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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Wi)t Students' Scries of Unglisi) Classics, 



TO furnish the educational public with well-edited editions of 
those authors used in, or required for admission to, many of 
the colleges, the publishers announce this new series. The fol- 
lowing books are now ready : 

Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, 30 cts. 

A Ballad Book, .... 54 . . 

Edited by Katharine Lee Bates, Wellesley College. 
Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum, 30 

Webster's First Bunker Hill Oration, 80 

Edited by Louise Manning Hodgkins, Wellesley College. 
Introduction to the Writings of John Ruskin, . 54 

Macaulay's Essay on Lord Clive, ... 42 

Edited by Vida D. Scudder, Wellesley College. 
George Eliot's Silas Marner, 48 

Scott's Marmion, . . 42 

Edited by Mary Harriott Norris, Instructor, New York. 
Sir Roger de Coverley Papers from The Spectator, . 42 

Edited by A. S. Roe, Worcester, Mass. 
Macaulay's Second Essay on the Earl of Chatham, . 42 

Edited by W. W. Curtis, High School, Pawtucket, R.I. 

Johnson's History of Rasselas, 42 

Edited by Fred N. Scott, University of Michigan. 
Joan of Arc and Other Selections from De Quincey, . . 42 
Edited by Henry H. Belfield, Chicago Manual Training School. 

We cannot speak too highly of the Students' Series of English Classics. 
— The Christian Union. 

Several others are in preparation, and all are substantially bound 
in cloth. 



LEAOH, SHEWELL, & SANBOEN, Publishers, 

BOSTON, NEW YORK, and CHICAGO. 



JOAN OF ARC 

AND 

OTHER SELECTIONS 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 

/. JOAN OF ABC. 

II. THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH (abridged). 

III. LEV AN A AND OUB LADIES OF SORROW. 

IV. DINNER, REAL AND REPUTED (abrit 



WITH INTRODUCTORY AND EXPLANATORY NOTES 



HENRY H. BELFIELD, PH.D. 

Director of the Chicago Manual Training School. 




LEACH, SHEWELL, & SANBORN, 

Boston ani> New York. 






V- 






Copyright, 1892, 
By Leach, Shewell, & Sanborn. 



/2-3/fo/ 



TYPE-SETTING AND ELECTBOTTriNG BY 

C. J. Peters & Son, Boston. 



Berwick & Smith, Printers, Boston. 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



Not to know De Quincey is to be ignorant of some of the most 
remarkable literary products of the century. His writings, con- 
tributed originally to magazines, have taken a permanent place in 
literature. For breadth of scope, for power and delicacy of thought, 
and for beauty and clearness of style, he is surpassed by none of 
his contemporaries, if, indeed, he is equalled by any one of them. 
In logic, humor, irony; in subtle power of analysis; in an appar- 
ently intuitive skill in adapting language to thought; in richness 
of illustration; in his unparalleled imagination, De Quincey stands 
in the very front rank of authors of all time. His description of 
a great scholar is but a partial description of himself: " Not one 
who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite 
and electrical power of combination, bringing together from the 
four winds, like the angel of the resurrection, what else were dust 
from dead men's bones into the unity of breathing life." 

It is doubtless true that the highest appreciation of De Quincey 
is possible only to those possessing a wide knowledge of literature 
and of men, and an imagination of unusual brilliancy; but it is 
also true that his writings can furnish a keen enjoyment to many 
not possessed of his own great qualities. It is hoped that the 
selections here given will stimulate thought, and lead to a closer 
acquaintance with this master of English prose. 

Chicago, July, 1892. H - H * B * 



CONTENTS. 



Introduction : page 

Thomas De Quincey 3 

De Quincey's Style 16 

Joan of Arc 20 

Selections: 

Joan of Arc , 27 

The English Mail-Coach 68 

Section the First 68 

Section the Second 83 

Section the Third . • 101 

Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow 113 

Dinner, Real and Reputed 123 

Notes : 

To Joan of Arc 147 

To the English Mail-Coach 156 

To Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow 161 

To Dinner, Real and Reputed 163 



INTRODUCTION. 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 

Thomas De Quincey was born in Manchester, August 15, 
1785, and died in Edinburgh, December 8, 1859, at the age of 
seventy-four. The family was Norman, having crossed the 
channel with the Conqueror, as the boy Thomas, at the age of 
fifteen, proudly told His Majesty, George III. Says De Quin- 
cey : " The family ascended to the highest rank in both king- 
doms (England and Scotland), and held the highest offices 
open to a subject." They took a distinguished part in at least 
one of the Crusades, and in the Barons' Wars in the time of 
Henry III. They were frequently, like many other noble 
houses, in arms against the reigning monarch ; and, in the 
thirteenth century, the head of the house, the Earl of Winches- 
ter, was attainted for treason. The Quincys of Massachusetts 
are descended from the same stock. 

The father of Thomas was a man of literary taste and 
ability, a successful merchant, who, dying at the age of 
thirty-nine, left a widow and six children. Mrs. De Quincey 
seems to have been a woman of unusual ability ; and the 
ample income derived from her husband's estate (£1,600 a 
year) enabled her to give her children the education which 
her own excellent judgment prescribed for them. That 
De Quincey recognized (in later years, at least) the advan- 
tages of his childhood is evident from the following passage, 

3 



4 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

which refers, probably, to their life at Greenhay, the family 
mansion near Manchester : — 

"We, the children of the house, stood, in fact, upon the 
very happiest tier in the social scaffolding for all good influ- 
ences. The prayer of Agur — 'Give me neither poverty nor 
riches ' — was realized for us. That blessing we had, being 
neither too high nor too low. High enough we were to see 
models of good manners, of self-respect, and of simple dig- 
nity ; obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes. 
Amply furnished with all the nobler benefits of wealth, with 
extra means of health, of intellectual culture, and of elegant 
enjoyment, on the other hand, we knew nothing of its social 
distinctions. Not depressed by the consciousness of privations 
too sordid, not tempted into restlessness by the consciousness 
of privileges too aspiring, we had no motives for shame, we 
had none for pride. Grateful also to this hour I am that, 
amidst luxuries in all things else, we were trained to a Spartan 
simplicity of diet — that we fared, in fact, very much less 
sumptuously than the servants. And if (after the model of 
the Emperor Marcus Aurelius) I should return thanks to 
Providence for all the separate blessings of my early situation, 
these four I would single out as worthy of special commemo- 
ration, — that I lived in a rustic solitude; that this solitude 
was in England ; that my infant feelings were moulded by 
the gentlest of sisters, and not by horrid, pugilistic brothers ; 
finally, that I and they were dutiful and loving members of 
a pure, holy, and magnificent church. " 

De Quincey possessed a delicately organized, sensitive nature, 
with an intellect wonderfully subtle. While he was from in- 
fancy given to day-dreaming, he was also singularly observant 
and alert. "My life." he says, "has been, on the whole, the 
life of a philosopher. From my birth I was made an intellec- 
tual creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits 



INTRODUCTION. 5 

and pleasures have been." " At less than eleven years of age, 
when as yet I was a very indifferent Grecian, I had become a 
brilliant master of Latinity, as my alcaics and choriambics 
remain to testify." "At thirteen I wrote Greek with ease; 
and at fifteen my command of that language was so great that 
I not only composed Greek verses in lyric metres, but would 
converse in Greek fluently and without embarrassment." 
" ' That boy,' said one of my masters, pointing the attention 
of a stranger to me — ' that boy could harangue an Athenian 
mob better than you or I could address an English one. 1 " 

This mastery of the classics was obtained, notwithstanding 
his early education was somewhat desultory, with a clergy- 
man in Manchester, at the Bath Grammar School, in a private 
school in Wiltshire, and in the Manchester Grammar School. 
To the last-named school he was sent at the age of fifteen, 
against his inclination and protests ; and he found it so intoler- 
able that, after enduring it for a year and a half, he left it by 
stealth, walking to his mother's home in Chester, a distance of 
forty miles. This escapade, or, as he calls it, " elopement," 
met his mother's emphatic disapproval ; but, owing to the kind 
intercession of an uncle, he was granted an allowance of a 
guinea a week, with permission to reside in AVales. After liv- 
ing the life of a vagrant in North Wales for a few months, he 
suddenly went to the metropolis, hiding himself in " the nation 
of London," hoping to secure money from the money-lenders 
there on his " expectations." Here he suffered from absolute 
want of food and shelter, and would probably have died but 
for the succor of an outcast whom he ever after remembered 
with the deepest gratitude. 

Of this part of his life De Quincey writes, in his "Confes- 
sions: " " I now suffered, for upwards of sixteen weeks, the 
physical anguish of hunger in various degrees of intensity ; 
but as bitter, perhaps, as ever any human being can have suf- 



6 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

fered who has survived it. A few fragments of bread from 
the breakfast table of one individual (who supposed me to 
be ill, but did not know of my being in utter want), and 
these at uncertain intervals, constituted my whole support." 

After a year of this London life De Quincey was reconciled 
to his guardians ; and in 1803, at the age of nineteen, he entered 
Worcester College, Oxford. 

De Quincey^ sufferings in Wales and London, of which he 
says he has not told a thousandth part, doubtless left their im- 
press upon him ; for, years afterwards, Carlyle said of him : 
" Eccovi! look at him : this child has been in Hell." 

De Quincey states that his residence at Oxford extended 
from 1803 to 1808, though his name appears on the books of 
his college till 1810. Apparently he followed his own fancy 
in reading, with but little regard to college requirements, and 
but little contact with the instructors. "I remember dis- 
tinctly," he says, " the first (which happened also to be the 
last) conversation that I ever held with my tutor. It consisted 
of three sentences, two of which fell to his share, one to mine." 
He lived the life of a recluse, "did not speak one hundred 
words during his first two years at Oxford," and devoted him- 
self to the study of literature, classical, German, and English. 
He speaks of "the tremendous hold taken of his entire sensi- 
bilities at this time by our own literature." He left Oxford 
without taking a degree. 

It was during his second year at the University that he first 
tasted opium, and laid the foundations of that pernicious habit 
which shattered his will-power, and rendered him, sometimes 
for consecutive years, incapable of sustained exertion. In 1813 
opium had become an article of daily diet. In 1816 he some- 
times consumed eight thousand drops of laudanum per day. 
Later, he took as much as twelve thousand drops (equal to 
grains of opium) daily. His struggles to free himself from 



INTRODUCTION. 7 

the chains of this appetite are depicted with great pathos in 
his " Confessions of an English Opium-Eater," first published 
in the London Magazine in 1821. 

In 1809 De Quincey took up his abode at Grasmere, where 
he enjoyed the society of Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, 
and Wilson, the famous " Lakists." Here he married, in 1816. 
The cottage which had been Wordsworth's was his home for 
twenty years ; and he gives a glimpse of a charming domestic 
life in it thus: "Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by 
twelve, and not more than seven and a half feet high. Make 
it populous with books, and furthermore, paint me a good 
fire ; and furniture plain and modest, befitting the unpretend- 
ing cottage of a scholar. And near the fire paint me a tea- 
table ; and (as it is clear that no creature can come to see one 
such a stormy night) place only two cups and saucers on the 
tea-tray ; and, if you know how to paint such a thing symboli- 
cally, or otherwise, paint me an eternal teapot, — eternal 
a parte ante, and a parte post; for I usually drink tea from eight 
o'clock at night to four in the morning. And, as it is very 
unpleasant to make tea, or to pour it out for one's self, paint 
me a lovely young woman sitting at the table. Paint her arms 
like Aurora's, and her smiles like Hebe's ; — but no, dear M., 
not even in jest let me insinuate that thy power to illuminate 
my cottage rests upon a tenure so perishable as mere personal 
beauty, or that the witchcraft of angelic smiles lies within the 
empire of any earthly pencil." 

This "lovely young woman" was his wife, Margaret 
Simpson, whom he married in her nineteenth year, and who 
shared his lot for twenty-one years, leaving six children, the 
eldest, Margaret, a womanly girl less than twenty years old. 
Two children (boys) had preceded their mother to the grave. 

De Quincey had now, under the goad of financial difficulties, 
entered upon his career of a writer of magazine articles, of 



8 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

which he was the author of fully one hundred and fifty. From 
1821 to 1825 he was a contributor to the London Magazine, 
spending much of his time in London. From 1825 to 1849 he 
wrote principally for Blackwood (fifty articles) , and was fre- 
quently in Edinburgh. He also wrote for TaiVs Magazine, and 
for Hogg's Instructor. His " Logic of Political Economy," the 
only one of his writings that first appeared in book form, was 
published in 1844, though written several years earlier. 

His magazine articles were first republished, in volumes, 
in Boston, beginning in 1852, without his knowledge. The 
American publishers generously shared the profits of the ven- 
ture with him. The first English edition of his collected 
writings was begun in 1853. 

In 1830 De Quincey removed his home from Grasmere to 
Edinburgh ; and in 1840 till his death he had a quiet cottage at 
Lass wade, seven miles from Edinburgh, in which city most of 
his time was spent. 

For a few months prior and subsequent to his marriage, 
De Quincey had reduced his daily allowance of opium, with 
the most beneficial results. " It was a year of brilliant water 
(to speak after the manner of jewellers), set, as it were, and 
insulated in the gloomy umbrage of opium. Now, then, I 
was again happy; I now took only one thousand drops of 
laudanum per day, — and what was that ? A latter spring had 
come to close up the season of youth : my brain performed its 
functions as healthily as ever before. I read Kant again, and 
again I understood him, or fancied that I did." But this 
reduction of the daily dose of the deadly drug was short-lived, 
and he was again in the power of the demon. 

"Up to the middle of 1817 I judged myself to have been a 
happy man. But now farewell, a long farewell, to happiness, 
winter or summer ! farewell to smiles and laughter ! farewell 
to peace of mind ! farewell to hope and to tranquil dreams, 



INTRODUCTION. 9 

and to the blessed consolations of sleep ! For more than three 
years and a half I am summoned away from these ; I am now 
arrived at an Iliad of woes, for I have now to record the pains 
of opium." He seemed to have lost the power of will ; since 
every duty Avas neglected, — studies, correspondence, domestic 
affairs. His nights were even more dreadful than his days. 
" I seemed every night to descend — not metaphorically, but 
literally to descend — into chasms and sunless abysses, depths 
below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever 
re-ascend. Nor did I, by waking, feel that I had re-ascended. 
This I do not dwell upon, because the state of gloom which 
attended these gorgeous spectacles, amounting at least to 
utter darkness, as of some suicidal despondency, cannot be 
approached by words." 

From this condition he aroused himself by a desperate effort. 
"A crisis arrived for the author's life, and a crisis for other 
objects still dearer to him, and which will always be far dearer 
to him than his life. I saw that I must die if I continued the 
opium. I determined, therefore, if that should be required, 
to die in throwing it off." But he never entirely abstained 
from the use of opium. 

De Quincey is thus described by Mr. J. R. Findlay: "A 
short and fragile, but well-proportioned frame ; a shapely and 
compact head; a face beaming with intellectual light, with 
rare, almost feminine beauty of feature and complexion; a 
fascinating courtesy of manner ; and a fulness, swiftness, and 
elegance of silvery speech, — such was the irresistible ' mortal 
mixture of earth's mould ' that men named De Quincey. He 
possessed in a high degree what the American poet Lowell 
calls • the grace of perfect breeding, everywhere persuasive 
and nowhere emphatic;' and his whole aspect and manner 
exercised an undefinable attraction over every one, gentle or 
simple, who came within its influence." 



10 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

John Hill Burton, in his "Book Hunter," thus describes 
De Quincey under the name " Papaverius : " — 

" No one speaks of waiting dinner for him. He will come 
and depart at his own sweet will, neither burdened with punc- 
tualities nor burdening others by exacting them. The festivi- 
ties of the afternoon are far on, when a commotion is heard in 
the hall, as if some dog or other stray animal had forced its 
way in. The instinct of a friendly guest tells him of the 
arrival : he opens the door and fetches in the little stranger. 
What can it be ? A street boy of some sort ? His costume, 
in fact, is a boy's duffle great-coat, very threadbare, with a 
hole in it, and, buttoned tight to the chin, where it meets the 
fragments of a party-colored belcher handkerchief; on his 
feet are list shoes, for it is a stormy winter night; and the 
trousers — some one suggests that they are inner linen gar- 
ments blackened with writing-ink, but that Papaverius never 
would have been at the trouble so to disguise them. What can 
be the theory of such a costume ? The simplest thing in the 
world, — it consisted of the fragments of apparel nearest at 
hand. Had chance thrown to him a court single-breasted coat, 
with a bishop's apron, a kilt, and top-boots, in these he would 
have made his entry. 

"The first impression that a boy has appeared vanishes 
instantly." 

In Mrs. Gordon's life of her father, Professor Wilson, with 
whom De Quincey was intimate, is this characteristic story : — 

" I remember his coming to Gloucester Place one stormy 
night. He remained hour after hour, in vain expectation that 
the waters would assuage and the hurly-burly cease. There 
was nothing for it but that our visitor should remain all night. 
The Professor ordered a room to be prepared for him ; and 
they found each other such good company that this accidental 
detention was prolonged, without further difficulty, for the 



INTRODUCTION. 11 

greater part of a year. During this visit some of his eccen- 
tricities did not escape observation. For example, he rarely 
appeared at the family meals, preferring to dine in his own 
room at his own hour, not unf requently turning night into day. 
His tastes were very simple, though a little troublesome, at 
least to the servant who prepared his repast. Coffee, boiled 
rice and milk, and a piece of mutton from the loin, were the 
materials that invariably formed his diet. The cook, who had 
an audience with him daily, received her instructions in silent 
awe, quite overpowered by his manner; for, had he been 
addressing a duchess, he could scarcely have spoken with 
more deference. He would couch his request in such terms as 
these : ' Owing to dyspepsia afflicting my system, and the pos- 
sibility of any additional disarrangement of the stomach tak- 
ing place, consequences incalculably distressing would arise, so 
much so, indeed, as to increase nervous irritation, and prevent 
me from attending to matters of overwhelming importance, if 
you do not remember to cut the mutton in a diagonal rather 
than in a longitudinal form.' The cook, a Scotchwoman, had 
great reverence for Mr. De Quincey as a man of genius ; but, 
after one of these interviews, her patience was pretty well ex- 
hausted, and she would say, ' Weel, I never heard the like o 1 
that in my days ; the bodie has an awfu 1 sicht o 1 words. If it 
had been my ain maister that was wanting his dinner, he 
would ha 1 ordered a hale tablefu' wi 1 little mair than a waff o' 
his hann ; and here's a' this claver aboot a bit mutton nae big- 
ger than a prin. Mr. De Quincey would mak 1 a gran' preacher, 
though I'm thinking a hantle o 1 the folk wouldna ken what he 
was driving at. 1 " 

During the last few years of his life his evenings were 
usually spent with his daughters at Lasswade. Here the 
charming character of the man appeared. One of his daugh- 
ters thus describes an evening in their modest home : — 



12 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

11 The newspaper was brought out, and he, telling in his 
own delightful way, rather than reading, the news, would, on 
questions from this one or that one of the party, often includ- 
ing young friends of his children, neighbors or visitors from 
distant places, illuminate the subject with such a wealth of 
memories, of old stories, of past or present experiences, of 
humor, of suggestion, even of prophecy, as by its very wealth 
makes it impossible to give any taste of it. He was not a re- 
assuring man for nervous people to live with, as those nights 
were exceptions on which he did not set something on fire, the 
commonest incident being for some one to look up from book 
or work to say casually, ' Papa, your hair is on fire ; ' of which 
a calm ' Is it, my love ? ' and a hand rubbing out the blaze was 
all the notice taken." 



" De Quincey has fully defined his own position and claim to 
distinction in the preface to his collected works. These he 
divides into three classes : 'first, that class which proposes 
primarily to amuse the reader,' such as the ' Narratives, Auto- 
biographic Sketches, etc. , ' second, papers which address them- 
selves purely to the understanding as an insulated faculty, or 
do so primarily,' such as the essays on Essenism, the Caesars, 
Cicero, etc. ; and, finally, as a third class, ' and, in virtue of 
their aim, as a far higher class of compositions,' he ranks 
those modes of impassioned prose ranging under no prece- 
dents that I am aware of in any literature, such as the ' Con- 
fessions ' and « Suspiria de Profundis.' The high claim here 
asserted has been so far questioned ; and short and isolated 
examples of eloquent apostrophe and highly wrought imagi- 
native description have been cited from Rousseau and other 
masters of style : but De Quincey's power of sustaining a fasci- 
nating and elevating strain of ' impassioned prose ' is allowed 



INTRODUCTION. 13 

to be entirely his own. In this his genius most emphatically 
asserts itself ; if it be not admitted that in that dread circle none 
durst walk but he, it will be without hesitation conceded that 
there he moves supreme. Another obvious quality of all his 
genius is its overflowing fulness of allusion and illustration, 
recalling his own description of a great philosopher or scholar, 
— ' Not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but 
also on an infinite and electrical power of combination, bringing 
together from the four winds, like the angel of the resurrec- 
tion, what else were dust from dead men's bones into the unity 
of breathing life.' To the discussion of things new, as readily 
as of things old, aided by a capacious, retentive, and ready 
memory, which dispensed with references to printed pages, he 
brought also the exquisite keenness and subtlety of his highly 
analytic and imaginative intellect, the illustrative stores of his 
vast and varied erudition, and that large infusion of common- 
sense which preserved him from becoming at any time a mere 
doctrinaire or visionary. Surprising as his literary achieve- 
ments are, his capabilities were still greater ; and the general 
survey leaves the impression of regret that, doing so much so 
well, he did not do more, or did not less better. Some things 
in his own line he has done perfectly : he has written many 
pages of magnificently mixed argument, irony, humor, and 
eloquence, which, for sustained brilliancy, richness, subtle 
force, and purity of style and effect, have simply no parallels ; 
and he is without peer the prince of dreamers. The use of 
opium no doubt stimulated this remarkable faculty of repro- 
ducing in skilfully selected phrase the grotesque and shifting 
forms of that ' cloudland, gorgeous land,' which opens to the 
sleep-closed eye ; but the faculty itself was a specialty of his 
constitution, colored by the quality of his genius, and enriched 
by the acquisitions of his intellect. 

" To the appreciation of De Quincey the reader must bring 



14 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

an imaginative faculty somewhat akin to his own, — a certain 
general culture, and large knowledge of books, and men, and 
things. Otherwise much of that slight and delicate allusion 
that gives point and color and charm to his writings will be 
missed ; and on this account the full enjoyment and compre- 
hension of De Quincey must always remain a luxury of the 
literary and intellectual. But his skill in narration, his rare 
pathos, his wide sympathies, the pomp of his dream-descrip- 
tions, the exquisite playfulness of his lighter dissertations, 
and his abounding though delicate and subtle humor, com- 
mend him to a larger class. He was a born critic and dreamer, 
a logician by instinct and culture, a student by choice, a 
scholar by right of conquest of the stores of many minds, a 
writer of English of the first quality by dint of native command 
of language and lifelong study and practice. His style, full 
and flexible, pure and polished, is peculiarly his own. It con- 
sists simply in the reader's assurance of the writer's complete 
mastery over all the infinite applicability and resources of the 
English language." — J. R. Findlay. 

11 De Quincey ranges with great freedom over the accumu- 
lated wealth of the language, his capacious memory giving 
him a prodigious command of words. His range is perhaps 
wider than either Macaulay's or Carlyle's, as he is more versa- 
tile in the ' pitch ' of his style, and does not disdain to use the 
♦slang' of all classes, from Cockney to Oxonian." — David 
Masson. 

" A great deal of De Quincey's best and most characteristic 
writing is in the stately and elaborate style here described 
[Professor Masson has been quoting a passage from De Quin- 
cey's comparison of the styles of Hazlitt and Lamb] , — the style 
of sustained splendor, of prolonged wheeling and soaring, as 
distinct from the style of crackle and brief glitter, of chirp and 
short flight. This is precisely on account of the exalted and 



INTRODUCTION. 15 

intricate nature of his meaning and feeling in those cases ; and, 
if some readers there fall off from him or dislike him, it is 
decause they themselves are deficient in wing and sinew. For 
those who do adhere to him and follow him in his passages of 
more involved and sustained eloquence, there are few greater 
pleasures possible in modern English prose. However mag- 
nificent the wording, there is always such an exact fit between 
it and the amount and shape of the under-fluctuating thought, 
that suspicion of inflation or bombast never occurs to one. The 
same presence everywhere of a vigilant intellect appears in 
the perfect logical articulation of sentence with sentence, and 
of clause with clause ; while the taste of the technical artist 
appears equally in the study of minute optical coherence in 
the imagery and in the fastidious care for fine sound. In this 
last quality of style — to which, in its lowest degree, Bentham 
gave the name of pronunciability , insisting most strenuously 
on its importance in all writing — De Quincey is a master. 
Such was the delicacy of his ear, however, that mere pro- 
nunciability was not enough for him, and musical beauty had 
to be superadded. Once, writing of Father Newman, and 
having described him as ' originally the ablest son of Puseyism, 
but now a powerful architect of religious philosophy on his 
own account, 1 he interrupts himself to explain that he might 
have ended the sentence more briefly by substituting for the 
last nine words the single phrase ' master-builder,' but that his 
ear could not endure ' a sentence ending with two consecutive 
trochees, and each of these trochees ending with the same 
syllable er.' He adds, ' Ah, reader, I would that the gods had 
made thee rhythmical, that thou mightest comprehend the 
thousandth part of my labors in the evasion of cacophony.' " — 
David Masson. 



16 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 



DE QUINCEY'S STYLE. 

[An able discussion of the style of De Quincey is given by 
Professor William Minto, in his "Manual of English Prose 
Literature," to which the teacher is referred.] 

ITS ELEMENTS. 

De Quincey was partial to words of Latin origin, and by 
their use gained precision in the expression of his thought 
and a rhythm impossible with an Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. 
But there is nothing in his writings suggestive of the style of 
Johnson. 

His writings abound in illustrations of the periodic sentence, 
always stately, but frequently long and involved. His has 
been called " the most eminent of modern masters " of periodic 
style; but his sentences are occasionally overloaded with 
qualifying clauses and parenthetical allusions to such an 
extent that many readers find difficulty in comprehending 
him. His desire to connect his sentences properly often pro- 
duces this result. " The two capital secrets of prose compo- 
sition,' 1 he remarks, "are these: first, the philosophy of 
transition and connection; second, the way in which sen- 
tences are made to modify each other. 1 ' Professor Bain says 
of one of De Quincey 1 s long sentences: "The words that 
make reference to what precedes .... form a considerable 
part of the sentence. Such profusion is characteristic of the 
author. The writings of De Quincey deserve especial men- 
tion on the point of explicit reference." But De Quincey knew 



INTRODUCTION. 17 

the value of short sentences. See, for instance, the passage 
on page 66 , beginning, " There is the great English Prince." 

De Quincey delights in tropes. "He uses comparatively 
few formal similitudes," says Minto, " but his pages are 
thickly strewn with ' tropes,' with metaphors, personifica- 
tions, synecdoches, and metonymies." 

ITS QUALITIES. 

His style cannot be called simple : it is frequently abstruse. 
But, if not always clear, it is exact. Minto says, " None of our 
writers in general literature have shown themselves so scrupu- 
lously precise. His works are still the crowning delicacy for 
lovers of formal, punctilious exactness." They abound in ex- 
amples of strength, elevation, and sublimity, in pathos and in 
humor. His " Joan of Arc " furnishes many examples of deep 
pathos ; while touches of delicate wit and humor illumine the 
driest subjects. His sense of the ludicrous seems sometimes 
to lead him beyond the bounds of good taste. But these are 
minor blemishes in a style that may be studied to advantage 
by any one. Of the melody and harmony of his style, Minto 
thus speaks : — 

"The melody of De Quincey's prose is pre-eminently rich 
and stately. He takes rank with Milton as one of our greatest 
masters of stately cadence, as well as of sublime composition. 
If one may trust one's ear for a general impression, Milton's 
melody is sweeter and more varied; but for magnificent 
effects, at least in prose, the palm must probably be assigned 
to De Quincey. In some of De Quincey's grandest passages 
the language can be compared only to the swell and crash of 
an orchestra." 

" The crowning glory of his writings is their style, so full of 
involved melody, so exact and careful, so rich in magnificent 



18 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

apostrophes, so markedly original, so polished and elaborate. 
He never forgot that the prose writer, if he wishes to attain 
excellence, must be as much of an artist as the poet, and 
fashion his periods and paragraphs with as much care as the 
poet elaborates his rhymes and cadences. Many passages 
might be quoted from De Quincey of which the melody is so 
striking as to irresistibly attract attention, and make us linger 
lovingly over them, apart altogether from the matter they con- 
tain." — Nicoll's " Landmarks of English Literature." 

"Though De Quincey was convinced that prose was his 
forte, and wisely worked in it, he had not a little of that 
poetic genius which is found in all great prose writers, and is 
intensified, as in his case so fully, by an intimate acquaintance 
with the best specimens of poetry. He had what lies below 
all high expression in prose or poetry — the instinct of literary 
form — what Matthew Arnold would call the sense of beauty. 
Intellectual as his style was, it was conspicuously artistic, and 
in this he has done the unspeakable service of showing that the 
best work in prose literature is neither the purely didactic nor 
the purely imaginative, but is seen in the judicious combination 
of those elements in what may be termed the expression of 
thought in esthetic form." — Hunt's " English Prose Writers." 

"One may fancy that if De Quincey's language were 
emptied of all meaning whatever, the mere sound of the words 
would move us, as the lovely word Mesopotamia moved White- 
field's hearers. The sentences are so delicately balanced, and 
so skilfully constructed, that his finer passages fix themselves 
in the memory without the aid of meter. Humbler writers are 
content if they can get through a single phrase without produ- 
cing a jar. They aim at keeping up a steady jog-trot, which 
shall not give actual pain to the jaws of the readers. Even 



INTRODUCTION. 19 

our great writers generally settle down to a stately but monot- 
onous gait, after the fashion of Johnson or Gibbon, or are con- 
tent with adopting a style as transparent and inconspicuous as 
possible. Language, according to the common phrase, is the 
dress of thought ; and that dress is best, according to modern 
canons of taste, which attracts least attention from its wearer. 
De Quincey scorns this sneering maxim of prudence, and 
boldly challenges our admiration by appearing in the richest 
coloring that can be got out of the dictionary. His language 
deserves a commendation sometimes bestowed by ladies upon 
rich garments, that it is capable of standing up by itself. The 
form is so admirable that, for purposes of criticism, we must 
consider it as something apart from the substance. The most 
exquisite passages in De Quincey's writings are all more or 
less attempts to carry out the idea expressed in the title of the 
"Dream Fugue." They are intended to be musical composi- 
tions, in which words have to play the part of notes. They are 
impassioned, not in the sense of expressing any definite senti- 
ment, but because, from the structure and combination of the 
sentences, they harmonize with certain phases of emotion. It 
is in the success with which he produces such effects as these 
that De Quincey may fairly claim to be almost, if not quite, 
unrivalled iri our language. Melancholy and an awe-stricken 
sense of the vast and vague are the emotions which he com- 
municates with the greatest power ; though the melancholy is 
too dreamy to deserve the name of passion, and the terror of 
the infinite is not explicitly connected with any religious emo- 
tion. It is a proof of the fineness of his taste that he scarcely 
ever falls into bombast. We tremble at his audacity in accu- 
mulating gorgeous phrases ; but we confess that he is justified 
by the result. I know of no other modern writer who has 
soared into the same regions with so uniform and easy a 
flight." — Leslie Stephen's "Hours in a Library." 



20 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 



JOAN OF ARC. 

[Since De Quincey did not purpose " to write the history of 
La Pucelle," a brief sketch of her life is here given.] 

When Joan of Arc presented herself before the Dauphin 
near the close of The Hundred Years' War, France was on the 
verge of total exhaustion. The wretched nation had suffered 
from foreign invasion and intestine strife. 

The best blood of its gallant men had been shed on the fatal 
fields of Crecy, of Poictiers, and of Agincourt. Its loyal 
women and tender children had shared with their husbands 
and fathers the famine fever of the sieges of Rouen and of 
Meaux. The English Henry had conquered Normandy, and 
was striving to win its loyalty to himself, when the assassina- 
tion of the Duke of Burgundy by the Dauphin had again 
plunged the country into the horrors of fratricidal warfare. 
The new Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, had become the 
fierce ally of the English invader. The treaty of Troyes 
(1420) had declared Henry V. Regent of France and heir to 
its throne on the death of Charles VI. ; had commanded all 
princes, peers, vassals, and communities of France to swear 
allegiance to Henry ; had placed the administration of the 
affairs of the kingdom in Henry's hands, and had united Henry, 
Charles, and Philip in active warfare against the Dauphin and 
his followers. Henry had entered Paris in triumph, and had 
been solemnly recognized by the States-General of the realm 
as the future sovereign of France. 



INTRODUCTION. 21 

Even the death of Henry and of Charles (1422) brought no 
relief to unhappy France ; for the infant Henry VI. had been 
at once proclaimed King of France, and the Dauphin had 
assumed the title of Charles VII. The Duke of Bedford, the 
warlike brother of the late king, had assumed the command 
of the allied forces, had defeated the Dauphin at Verneuil 
(1424), and had now invested Orleans (1428). 

"Seldom has the extinction of a nation's independence 
appeared more inevitable than was the case in France when 
the English invaders completed their lines round Orleans. A 
series of dreadful defeats had thinned the chivalry of France, 
and daunted the spirits of her soldiers. A foreign king had 
been proclaimed in her capital, and foreign armies of the 
bravest veterans, led by the ablest captains then known in the 
world, occupied the fairest portions of her territory. Worse 
to her, even, than the fierceness and the strength of her foes, 
were the factions, the vices, and the crimes of her own chil- 
dren. Her native prince was a dissolute trifler, stained with 
the assassination of the most powerful noble of the land, whose 
son, in revenge, had leagued himself with the enemy. Many 
more of her nobility, many of her prelates, her magistrates, 
and rulers, had sworn fealty to the English king. The condi- 
tion of the peasantry amid the general prevalence of anarchy 
and brigandage, which were added to the customary devasta- 
tions of contending armies, was wretched beyond the power of 
language to describe." — Creasy: Fifteen Decisive Battles, 
chap. ix. 

It was at this crisis, when the English were masters of all 
French territory north of the Loire, when Orleans, the last 
stronghold of the French national party, the only remaining 
obstacle to the entire subjugation of the kingdom, had already 
offered to surrender to the Duke of Burgundy, when the pusil- 



22 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

lanimous Charles was preparing to abandon the country 
which he was too weak to save, — it was at this supreme mo- 
ment of despair that Joan of Arc appears. " Gentle Dauphin," 
said she, " my name is Jeanne the Maid. The Heavenly King 
sends me to tell you that you shall be anointed and crowned 
in the city of Rheims." 

Joan of Arc (or Jeanne d'Arc, or perhaps more properly, 
Joanneta Dare) was born about 1411, at Domremy, a village 
partly in Champagne, partly in Lorraine. She was the third 
daughter of Jacques Dare, a peasant proprietor, and his wife, 
Isabeau de Vauthon. Joan was a strong, healthy girl, profi- 
cient in housework, unable *to read or write, taught by her 
mother to repeat the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, and the 
Credo. As she grew to womanhood her thoughts seemed to 
be fixed on the unhappy condition of her country. Her ardent 
patriotism, sympathetic nature, and earnest piety led her to 
spend much time in meditation and prayer for her country. 
Her vivid imagination assisted her belief in the reality of 
supernatural visitation. These "Heavenly Voices," as she 
called them, were first perceived by her about the age of 
thirteen ; and she persisted to the bitter end that she had been 
directed by them. She was convinced that it was her duty to 
relieve Orleans, and cause the Dauphin to be crowned at 
Rheims. Accordingly, against the wishes of her parents, to 
whom in all other respects she had been a dutiful daughter, 
she secured an audience with Charles, then holding court at 
^hinon. After considerable hesitancy Charles accepted her 
proffered assistance ; and she soon marched with four thou- 
sand or five thousand men to the relief of Orleans. April 29, 
1429, she entered Orleans at the head of her relieving army. 
The French were greatly inspirited by her presence, attributing 
her success to divine interposition. The English were corre- 
spondingly depressed in spirit, believing Joan to be in league 



INTRODUCTION. 23 

with the devil. The English raised the siege of Orleans May 
8, 1429. The French pursued, defeating the English in the 
decisive battle of Patay, and driving them north of the Loire. 
July 17, of the same year, Charles was crowned at Rheims; 
and Joan, having accomplished her divinely inspired mission, 
the relief of Orleans and the crowning of Charles, begged to 
be relieved of all further duty, and to be permitted to retire 
to the home of her parents. She was prevailed upon, how- 
ever, to continue with the army ; and fought with equal devo- 
tion, though perhaps with less enthusiasm, declaring that she 
would perish within a year. In a disastrous attack on Paris, 
September 8, she was severely wounded ; and on the 24th of 
May, 1430, while leading an unsuccessful sortie from Com- 
piegne, she was captured by the Burgundians. 

Through the malignity of the Bishop of Beauvais, and the 
perseverance of the University of Paris and the Inquisition, 
Joan was sold to the English for a large sum of money ; and 
on the 3d of January, 1431, she was delivered for trial to the 
Inquisition, on the charge of being a heretic and a sorcerer. 
Her judges, with one exception French priests and prelates, 
condemned her to death. She was pardoned May 24 ; but hav- 
ing been induced by her keepers to resume her male attire, 
she was deemed to have relapsed ; and May 30, 1431, she was 
burned alive in the market-place of Rouen. 

By a decree of the pope, July 7, 1456, her sentence was re- 
voked ; and since that time Catholic writers have maintained 
the genuineness of her divine inspiration. 

A monument to her memory marks the spot where she was 
burned, and an equestrian statue has been erected to her mem- 
ory in Paris. 

Joan of Arc was one of many persons, such, for instance, as 
Savonarola, who have claimed to receive supernatural aid 
through visible and audible means. That she was honest in 



24 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

this belief there can be no doubt. In her dungeon, but a short 
time before her execution, she said, "Yes, I have seen these 
apparitions clearly, as clearly as I have seen, the rush of battle 
and the gleam of sword and spear." And in the midst of the 
flames which destroyed her young body, she exclaimed, " Yes, 
my voices were from God ; they have not deceived me ! " 

Neither can a shadow of suspicion rest upon the purity of 
her life and the integrity of her purpose. Nothing swerved 
her from the great object of her life. The pleasures of the 
French court she despised ; and the ennobling of her family 
under the name of du Lis seemed to her, peasant girl as she 
was, but a bauble. 

Her success in arms was probably due to the enthusiasm 
which she roused in the French soldiery, who were fully per- 
suaded of the truth of her claims to divine inspiration and 
leadership. The success of the loyal French under her gener- 
alship (if such a term can properly be applied to her enthu- 
siastic and dogged fighting) is astonishing. Joan marched 
from Blois to Orleans with the relieving army, April 25 ; and 
on July 16, less than three months, Charles was crowned at 
Rheims. That the English recognized Joan as the cause of 
the turn in their fortunes is known from contemporary writers. 
The Duke of Bedford thus writes to his nephew, Henry VI. : — 

" And alle thing there prospered for you til the tyme of the 
Siege of Orleans, taken in hand God knoweth by what advis. 

' « At the which tyme, after the adventure fallen to the persone 
of my cousin of Salisbury [Salisbury was killed by a cannon- 
ball during the siege] , whom God assoille, there f elle, by the 
hand of God as it seemeth, a great strook upon your peuple that 
was assembled there in grete nombre, caused in grete partie, 
as y trowe, of lakke of sad beleve, and of unlevefulle doubte, 
that thei hadde of a deciple and lyme of the Feende, called 
the Pucelle, that used fals enchantments and sorcerie. 



INTRODUCTION. 25 

" The whiche strooke and discomfiture nott oonly lessed in 
grete partie the nombre of your peuple there, but as well 
withdrewe the courage of the remenant in merveillous wyse, 
and couraiged your adverse partie and enneniys to assemble 
them forthwith in grete nombre." 

In fact, the siege of Orleans was the turning-point of Eng- 
lish dominion in France. From that time they continually 
lost ground, until, in 1452, of all their extensive possessions, 
only Calais remained. 

The life of Joan of Arc, whom the English historian Green 
(J. R.) describes as " the one pure figure which rises out of 
the greed, the lust, the selfishness, and unbelief of the time," 
has been written many times in various languages. The prin- 
cipal lives in English are by Harriet Parr (1866), Mrs. Bray 
(1874), and Janet Tuckey (1880). The article in the Encyclo- 
paedia Britannica, ninth edition, is brief and pointed. See 
also Michelet's and Kitchin's Histories of France : also Creasy's 
"Fifteen Decisive Battles," and Hallam's "Middle Ages." 
The Encyclopaedia Britannica says: "All previous works on 
Joan of Arc were deprived of a great part of their critical 
value by the publication, in five volumes, of the " Proces de 
Condamnation et de Rehabilitation de Jean d'Arc," edited by J. 
Quicherat. The record of the "Proces de Condamnation" 
consisted originally of the official notes of the trial, afterwards 
edited in Latin by P. Cauchon, and bears internal marks of 
general truthfulness." A French translation of the " Proces " 
appeared in 1868. 

Joan has also been the subject of many dramas and poems, 
of which the principal are, Schiller's "Die Jungfrau von 
Orleans" and Southey's " Joan of Arc." 



SELECTIONS FROM THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 



JOAN OF AEC. 

IN REFERENCE TO M. MICHELET's HISTORY OF FRANCE. 

What is to be thought of her ? What is to be thought 
of the poor shepherd girl from the hills and forests of 
Lorraine, that — like the Hebrew shepherd boy from the 
hills and forests of Judea — rose suddenly out of the 
quiet, out of the safety, out of the religious inspiration, 5 
rooted in deep pastoral solitudes, to a station in the van 
of armies, and to the more perilous station at the right 
hand of kings ? The Hebrew boy inaugurated his 
patriotic mission by an act, by a victorious act, such as 
no man could deny. But so did the girl of Lorraine, if 10 
we read her story as it was read by those who saw her 
nearest. Adverse armies bore witness to the boy as no 
pretender ; but so they did to the gentle girl. Judged 
by the voice of all who saw them from a station of good- 
ivill, both were found true and loyal to any promises in- 15 
volved in their first acts. Enemies it was that made the 
difference between their subsequent fortunes. The boy 
rose to a splendor and a noonday prosperity, both per- 
sonal and public, that rang through the records of his 

27 



28 THOMAS BE QUINCEY. 

people, and became a by-word amongst his posterity 
for a thousand years, until the sceptre was departing 
from Judah. The poor, forsaken girl, on the contrary, 
drank not herself from that cup of rest which she had 

5 secured for France. She never sang together with the 
songs that rose in her native Domremy, as echoes to the 
departing steps of invaders. She mingled not in festal 
dances at Vaucouleurs which celebrated in rapture the 
redemption of France. No ! for her voice was then 

10 silent : no ! for her feet were dust. Pure, innocent, 
noble-hearted girl ! whom, from earliest youth, ever I 
believed in as full of truth and self-sacrifice, this was 
amongst the strongest pledges for thy truth, that never 
once — no, not for a moment of weakness — didst thou 

15 revel in the vision of coronets and honor from man. 
Coronets for thee ! Oh no ! Honors, if they come 
when all is over, are for those that share thy blood. 
Daughter of Domremy, when the gratitude of thy king 
shall awaken, thou wilt be sleeping the sleep of the 

20 dead. Call her, King of France, but she will not hear 
thee ! Cite her by thy apparitors to come and receive a 
robe of honor, but she will be found en contumace. 
When the thunders of universal France, as even yet 
may happen, shall proclaim the grandeur of the poor 

25 shepherd girl that gave up all for her country, thy ear, 
young shepherd girl, will have been deaf for five cen- 
turies. To suffer and to do, that was thy portion in this 
life ; that was thy destiny ; and not for a moment was 
it hidden from thyself. Life, thou saidst, is short : and 
the sleep which is in the grave is long ! Let me use that 



JOAN OF ARC. 29 

life, so transitory, for the glory of those heavenly 
dreams destined to comfort the sleep which is so long. 
This pure creature — pure from every suspicion of even 
a visionary self-interest, even as she was pure in senses 
more obvious — never once did this holy child, as re- 5 
garded herself, relax from her belief in the darkness that 
was travelling to meet her. She might not prefigure the 
very manner of her death ; she saw not in vision, perhaps, 
the aerial altitude of the fiery scaffold, the spectators 
without end on every road pouring into Rouen as to a 10 
coronation, the surging smoke, the volleying flames, the 
hostile faces all around, the pitying eye that lurked but 
here and there, until nature and imperishable truth 
broke loose from artificial restraints ; — these might not 
be apparent through the mists of the hurrying future. 15 
But the voice that called her to death, that she heard 
forever. 

Great was the throne of France even in those days, 
and great was he that sat upon it ; but well Joanna knew 
that not the throne, nor he that sat upon it, was for her ; 20 
but, on the contrary, that she was for them ; not she by 
them, but they by her, should rise from the dust. Gor- 
geous were the lilies of France, and for centuries had 
the privilege to spread their beauty over land and sea, 
until, in another century, the wrath of God and man 25 
combined to wither them ; but well Joanna knew, early 
at Domremy she had read that bitter truth, that the 
lilies of France would decorate no garland for her. 
Flower nor bud, bell nor blossom, would ever bloom for 
her. 



30 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

But stay. What reason is there for taking up this 
subject of Joanna precisely in the spring of 1847 ? 
Might it not have been left till the spring of 1947 ; or, 
perhaps, left till called for ? Yes, but it is called for ; 
5 and clamorously. You are aware, reader, that amongst 
the many original thinkers whom modern France has 
produced, one of the reputed leaders is M. Michelet. 
All these writers are of a revolutionary cast ; not in a 
political sense merely, but in all senses ; mad, often- 

10 times, as March hares ; crazy with the laughing-gas of 
recovered liberty ; drunk with the wine-cup of their 
mighty revolution ; snorting, whinnying, throwing up 
their heels, like wild horses in the boundless pampas, 
and running races of defiance with snipes, or with the 

15 winds, or with their own shadows, if they can find noth- 
ing else to challenge. Some time or other I, that have 
leisure to read, may introduce you, that have not, to two 
or three dozen of these writers ; of whom I can assure 
you beforehand, that they are often profound, and at 

20 intervals are even as impassioned as if they were come 
of our best English blood. But now, confining our 
attention to M. Michelet, we in England — who know 
him best by his worst book, the book against priests, 
etc. — know him disadvantageously. That book is a 

25 rhapsody of incoherence. But his " History of France " 
is quite another thing. A man, in whatsoever craft he 
sails, cannot stretch away out of sight when he is linked 
to the windings of the shore by towing-ropes of history. 
Facts, and the consequences of facts, draw the writer 
back to the falconer's lure from the giddiest heights of 



JOAN OF ARC. 31 

speculation. Here, therefore, — in his " France," — if 
not always free from flightiness, if now and then off 
like a rocket for an airy wheel in the clouds, M. Michelet, 
with natural politeness, never forgets that he has left a 
large audience waiting for him on earth, and gazing 5 
upwards in anxiety for his return : return, therefore, he 
does. But history, though clear of certain temptations 
in one direction, has separate dangers of its own. It is. 
impossible so to write a history of France, or of Eng- 
land — works becoming every hour more indispensable 10 
to the inevitably political man of this day — without 
perilous openings for error. If I, for instance, on the 
part of England, should happen to turn my labors in 
that channel, and (on the model of Lord Percy going to 
Chevy Chase) 15 

" A vow to God should make 
My pleasure in the Michelet woods 
Three summer days to take," 

probably, from simple delirium, I might hunt M. Michelet 
into delirium tremens. Two strong angels stand by the 
side of history, whether French history or English, as 
heraldic supporters : the angel of research on the left 
hand, that must read millions of dusty parchments, and 20 
of pages blotted with lies ; the angel of meditation on the 
right hand, that must cleanse these lying records with 
fire, even as of old the draperies of asbestos were cleansed, 
and must quicken them into regenerated life. Willingly 
I acknowledge that no man will ever avoid innumerable 25 
errors of detail ; with so vast a compass of ground to 



32 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

traverse, this is impossible ; but such errors (though I 
have a bushel on hand, at M. Michelet's service) are not 
the game I chase ; it is the bitter and unfair spirit in 
which M. Michelet writes against England. Even that, 

5 after all, is but my secondary object ; the real one is 
Joanna the Pucelle d'Orleans for herself. 

I am not going to write the History of La Pucelle : to 
do this, or even circumstantially to report the history of 
her persecution and bitter death, of her struggle with 

10 false witnesses and with ensnaring judges, it would be 
necessary to have before us all the documents, and 
therefore the collection only now forthcoming in Paris. 
But my purpose is narrower. There have been great 
thinkers, disdaining the careless judgments of con- 

15 temporaries, who have thrown themselves boldly on the 
judgment of a far posterity, that should have had time 
to review, to ponder, to compare. There have been 
great actors on the stage of tragic humanity that might, 
with the same depth of confidence, have appealed from 

20 the levity of compatriot friends — too heartless for the 
sublime interest of their story, and too impatient for the 
labor of sifting its perplexities — to the magnanimity 
and justice of enemies. To this class belongs the Maid 
of Arc. The ancient Romans were too faithful to the 

25 ideal of grandeur in themselves not to relent, after a 
generation or two, before the grandeur of Hannibal. 
Mithridates — a more doubtful person — yet merely for 
the magic perseverance of his indomitable malice, won 
from the same Romans the only real honor that ever he 
received on earth. And we English have ever shown 



JOAN OF ARC. 33 

the same homage to stubborn enmity. To work un- 
flinchingly for the ruin of England ; to say through life, 
by word and by deed, Delanda est Anglia Victrix ! that 
one purpose of malice, faithfully pursued, has quartered 
some people upon our national funds of homage as by a 5 
perpetual annuity. Better than an inheritance of ser- 
vice rendered to England herself, has sometimes proved 
the most insane hatred to England. Hyder Ali, even his 
son Tippoo, though so far inferior, and Napoleon, have all 
benefited by this disposition amongst ourselves to exag- 10 
gerate the merit of diabolic enmity. Not one of these 
men was ever capable, in a solitary instance, of praising 
an enemy [what do you say to that, reader ? ], and yet 
in their behalf, we consent to forget, not their crimes 
only, but (which is worse) their hideous bigotry and 15 
anti-magnanimous egotism, for nationality it was not. 
Suffrein, and some half-dozen of other French nautical 
heroes, because rightly they did us all the mischief they 
could (which was really great), are names justly rever- 
enced in England. On the same principle, La Pucelle 20 
d'Orleans, the victorious enemy of England, has been 
destined to receive her deepest commemoration from the 
magnanimous justice of Englishmen. 

Joanna, as we in England should call her, but, accord- 
ing to her own statement, Jeanne (or, as M. Michelet 25 
asserts, Jean) d'Arc, was born at Domremy, a village 
on the marches of Lorraine and Champagne, and depend- 
ent upon the town of Vaucouleurs. I have called her a 
Lorrainer, not simply because the word is prettier, but 
because Champagne too odiously reminds us English of 



34 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

what are for us imaginary wines, which, undoubtedly, 
La Pucelle tasted as rarely as we English ; we English, 
because the champagne of London is chiefly grown in 
Devonshire ; La Pucelle, because the champagne of 
5 Champagne never, by any chance, flowed into the foun- 
tain of Domreiny, from which only she drank. M. 
Michelet will have her to be a Champenoise, and for no 
better reason than that she " took after her father," who 
happened to be a Champenois. 

10 These disputes, however, turn on refinements too nice. 
Domremy stood upon the frontiers, and, like other 
frontiers, produced a mixed race representing the cis and 
the trans. A river (it is true) formed the boundary -line 
at this point — the river Meuse ; and that, in old days, 

15 might have divided the populations ; but in these days it 
did not: there were bridges, there were ferries, and 
weddings crossed from the right bank to the left. Here 
lay two great roads, not so much for travellers that were 
few, as for armies that were too many by half. These 

20 two roads, one of which was the great highroad between 
France and Germany, decussated at this very point; 
which is a learned way of saying that they formed a 
St. Andrew's cross, or letter X- I hope the compositor 
will choose a good large X, in which case the point of 

25 intersection, the locus of conflux and intersection for 
these four diverging arms, will finish the reader's 
geographical education, by showing him to a hair's- 
breadth where it was that Domremy stood. Those 
roads, so grandly situated, as great trunk arteries be- 
tween two mighty realms, and haunted forever by wars, 



JOAN OF ARC. 85 

or rumors of wars, decussated (for anything I know to 
the contrary) absolutely under Joanna's bedroom win- 
dow ; one rolling away to the right, past Monsieur 
d' Arc's old barn, and the other unaccountably prefer- 
ring to sweep round that odious man's pig-sty to the left. 5 

On whichever side of the border chance had thrown 
Joanna, the same love to France would have been nur- 
tured. For it is a strange fact, noticed by M. Michelet 
and others, that the Dukes of Bar and Lorraine had for 
generations pursued the policy of eternal warfare with 10 
France on their own account, yet also of eternal amity 
and league with France in case anybody else presumed 
to attack her. Let peace settle upon France, and before 
long you might rely upon seeing the little vixen Lorraine 
flying at the throat of France. Let France be assailed 15 
by a formidable enemy, and instantly you saw a duke of 
Lorraine insisting on having his own throat cut in 
support of France ; which favor accordingly was cheer- 
fully granted to him in three great successive battles — 
twice by the English, viz., at Crecy and Agincourt, once 20 
by the Sultan at Mcopolis. 

This sympathy with France during great eclipses, in 
those that during ordinary seasons were always teasing 
her with brawls and guerilla inroads, strengthened the 
natural piety to France of those that were confessedly 25 
the children of her own house. The outposts of France, 
as one may call the great frontier provinces, were of all 
localities the most devoted to the Fleurs cle Lis. To 
witness, at any great crisis, the generous devotion to these 
lilies of the little fiery cousin that in gentler weather 



36 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

was forever tilting at the breast of France, could not 
but fan the zeal of France's legitimate daughters : whilst 
to occupy a post of honor on the frontiers against an 
old hereditary enemy of France, would naturally stimu- 
5 late this zeal by a sentiment of martial pride, by a sense 
of danger always threatening, and of hatred always 
smouldering. That great four-headed road was a per- 
petual memento to patriotic ardor. To say, this way 
lies the road to Paris, and that other way to Aix-la- 

10 Chapelle, this to Prague, that* to Vienna, nourished the 
warfare of the heart by daily ministrations of sense. 
The eye that watched for the gleams of lance or helmet 
from the hostile frontier, the ear that listened for the 
groaning of wheels, made the high-road itself, with its 

15 relations to centres so remote, into a manual of patriotic 
duty. 

The situation, therefore, locally, of Joanna was full of 
profound suggestions to a heart that listened for the 
stealthy steps of change and fear that too surely were in 

20 motion. But, if the place were grand, the time, the 
burden of the time, was far more so. The air overhead 
in its upper chambers was hurtling with the obscure 
sound ; was dark with sullen fermenting of storms that 
had been gathering for a hundred and thirty years. The 

25 battle of Agincourt, in Joanna's childhood, had reopened 
the wounds of France. Crecy and Poictiers, those 
withering overthrows for the chivalry of France, had, 
before Agincourt occurred, been tranquillized by more 
than half a century; but this resurrection of their 
trumpet wails made the whole series of battles and end- 



JOAN OF ARC. 37 

less skirmishes take their stations as parts in one drama. 
The graves that had closed sixty years ago, seemed to 
fly open in sympathy with a sorrow that echoed their 
own. The monarchy of France labored in extremity, 
rocked and reeled like a ship fighting with the darkness 5 
of monsoons. The madness of the poor king (Charles 
VI.) falling in at such a crisis, like the case of women 
laboring in childbirth during the storming of a city, 
trebled the awfulness of the time. Even the wild 
story of the incident which had immediately occasioned 10 
the explosion of this madness — the case of a man un- 
known, gloomy, and perhaps maniacal himself, coming 
out of a forest at noonday, laying his hand upon the 
bridle of the king's horse, checking him for a moment to 
say, ' O king, thou art betrayed/ and then vanishing, no 15 
man knew whither, as he had appeared for no man knew 
what — fell in with the universal prostration of mind 
that laid France on her knees, as before the slow un- 
weaving of some ancient prophetic doom. The famines, 
the extraordinary diseases, the insurrections of the 20 
peasantry up and down Europe — these were chords 
struck from the same mysterious harp ; but these were 
transitory chords. There have been others of deeper 
and more ominous sound. The termination of the 
Crusades, the destruction of the Templars, the Papal 25 
interdicts, the tragedies caused or suffered by the house 
of Anjou, and by the emperor, — these were full of a 
more permanent significance. But, since then, the 
colossal figure of feudalism was seen standing, as it 
were, on tiptoe, at Crecy, for flight from earth ; that was 



38 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

a revolution unparalleled ; yet that was a trifle, by com- 
parison with, the more fearful revolutions that were 
mining below the Church. By her own internal schisms, 
by the abominable spectacle of a double pope — so that 

5 no man, except through political bias, could even guess 
which was Heaven's vicegerent, and which the creature 
of hell — the Church was rehearsing, as in still earlier 
forms she had already rehearsed, those vast rents in her 
foundations which no man should ever heal. 

10 These were the loftiest peaks of the cloudland in the 
skies, that to the scientific gazer first caught the colors of 
the new morning in advance. But the whole vast range 
alike of sweeping glooms overhead, dwelt upon all med- 
itative minds, even upon those that could not distinguish 

15 the tendencies nor decipher the forms. It was, there- 
fore, not her own age alone, as affected by its immediate 
calamities, that lay with such weight upon Joanna's 
mind ; but her own age, as one section in a vast myste- 
rious drama, unweaving through a century back, and 

20 drawing nearer continually to some dreadful crisis. 
Cataracts and rapids were heard roaring ahead; and 
signs were seen far back, by help of old men's memories, 
which answered secretly to signs now coming forward 
on the eye, even as locks answer to keys. It was not 

25 wonderful that in such a haunted solitude, with such a 
haunted heart, Joanna should see angelic visions and 
hear angelic voices. These voices whispered to her for- 
ever the duty, self imposed, of delivering France. Five 
years she listened to these monitory voices with internal 
struggles. At length she could resist no longer. Doubt 



JOAN OF ARC. 39 

gave way; and she left her home forever in order to 
present herself at the dauphin's court. 

The education of this poor girl was mean, according to 
the present standard : was ineffably grand, according to 
a purer philosophic standard : and only not good for our 5 
age because for us it would be unattainable. She read 
nothing, for she could not read; but she had heard 
others read parts of the Roman martyrology. She wept 
in sympathy with the sad Misereres of the Roniish 
Church ; she rose to heaven with the glad triumphant 10 
Te Deums of Rome : she drew her comfort and her vital 
strength from the rites of the same Church. But, next 
after these spiritual advantages, she owed most to the 
advantages of her situation. The fountain of Domremy 
was on the brink of a boundless forest ; and it was 15 
haunted to that degree by fairies that the parish priest 
(cure) was obliged to read mass there once a year, in 
order to keep them in any decent bounds. Fairies are 
important, even in a statistical view : certain weeds 
mark poverty in the soil, fairies mark its solitude. As 20 
surely as the wolf retires before cities, does the fairy 
sequester herself from the haunts of the licensed vic- 
tualler. A village is too much for her nervous delicacy : 
at most, she can tolerate a distant view of a hamlet. 
We may judge, therefore, by the uneasiness and extra 25 
trouble which they gave to the parson, in what strength 
the fairies mustered at Domremy ; and, by a satisfactory 
consequence, how thinly sown with men and women 
must have been that region even in its inhabited spots. 
But the forests of Domremy — those were the glories of 



40 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 

the land : for in them abode mysterious power and 
ancient secrets that towered into tragic strength. " Ab- 
beys there were, and abbey windows," — " like Moorish 
temples of the Hindoos/' that exercised even princely 

5 power both in Lorraine and in the G-erman Diets. These 
had their sweet bells that pierced the forest for many a 
league at matins or vespers, and each its own dreamy 
legend. Few enough, and scattered enough, were these 
abbeys, so as in no degree to disturb the deep solitude 

10 of the region ; yet many enough to spread a network or 
awning of Christian sanctity over what else might have 
seemed a heathen wilderness. This sort of religious 
talisman being secured, a man the most afraid of ghosts 
(like myself, suppose, or the reader) becomes armed 

15 into courage to wander for days in their sylvan recesses. 
The mountains of the Vosges, on the eastern frontier of 
France, have never attracted much notice from Europe, 
except in 1813-14 for a few brief months, when they fell 
within Napoleon's line of defence against the Allies. But 

20 they are interesting for this, amongst other features, that 
they do not, like some loftier ranges, repel woods : the 
forests and the hills are on sociable terms. Live and 
let live is their motto. For this reason, in part, these 
tracts in Lorraine were a favorite hunting-ground with 

25 the Carlovingian princes. About six hundred years 
before Joanna's childhood, Charlemagne was known to 
have hunted there. That, of itself, was a grand incident 
in the traditions of a forest or a chase. In these vast 
forests, also, were to be found (if anywhere to be found) 
those mysterious fawns that tempted solitary hunters 



JOAN OF ARC. 41 

into visionary and perilous pursuits. Here was seen 
(if anywhere seen) that ancient stag who was already 
nine hundred years old, but possibly a hundred or two 
more, when met by Charlemagne ; and the thing was put 
beyond doubt by the inscription upon his golden collar. 5 
I believe Charlemagne knighted the stag ; and, if ever he 
is met again by a king, he ought to be made an earl — or, 
being upon the marches of France, a marquis. Observe, 
I don't absolutely vouch for all these things : my own 
opinion varies. On a fine breezy forenoon I am auda- 10 
ciously sceptical ; but, as twilight sets in, my credulity 
grows steadily, till it becomes equal to anything that 
could be desired. And I have heard candid sportsmen 
declare that, outside of these very forests, they laughed 
loudly at all the dim tales connected with their haunted 15 
solitude ; but, on reaching a spot notoriously eighteen 
miles deep within them, they agreed with Sir Roger de 
Coverley, that a good deal might be said on both sides. 

Such traditions, or any others that (like the stag) con- 
nect distant generations with each other, are, for that 20 
cause, sublime ; and the sense of the shadowy, connected 
with such appearances that reveal themselves or not ac- 
cording to circumstances, leaves a coloring of sanctity 
over ancient forests, even in those minds that utterly 
reject the legend as a fact. 25 

But, apart from all distinct stories of that order, in 
any solitary frontier between two great empires, as here, 
for instance, or in the desert between Syria and the 
Euphrates, there is an inevitable tendency in minds of 
any deep sensibility, to people the solitudes with phan- 



42 THOMAS BE QUINCEY. 

torn images of powers that were of old so vast. Joanna, 
therefore, in her quiet occupation of a shepherdess, would 
be led continually to brood over the political condition 
of her country, by the traditions of the past no less 
5 than by the mementoes of the local present. 

M. Miohelet, indeed, says that La Pucelle was not a 
shepherdess. I beg his pardon: she ivas. What he 
rests upon, I guess pretty well : it is the evidence of a 
woman called Haumette, the most confidential friend of 

10 Joanna. Now, she is a good witness, and a good girl, 
and I like her ; for she makes a natural and affectionate 
report of Joanna's ordinary life. But still, however 
good she may be as a witness, Joanna is better ; and she, 
when speaking to the dauphin, calls herself in the Latin 

15 report Bergereta. Even Haumette confesses that Jo- 
anna tended sheep in her girlhood. And I believe that 
if Miss Haumette were taking coffee alone with me this 
very evening (February 12, 1847) — in which there 
would be no subject for scandal or for maiden blushes, 

20 because I am an intense philosopher, and Miss H. would 
be hard upon four hundred and fifty years — she would 
admit the following comment upon her evidence to be 
right. A Frenchman, about forty years ago, M. Simond, 
in his " Travels," mentions incidentally the following 

25 hideous scene as one steadily observed and watched by 
himself, in chivalrous France, not very long before the 
French Revolution : A peasant was ploughing ; the team 
that drew his plough was a donkey and a woman. Both 
were regularly harnessed : both pulled alike. This is 
bad enough j but the Frenchman adds that, in distribut- 



JOAN OF ARC. 43 

ing his lashes, the peasant was obviously desirous of 
being impartial ; or, if either the yoke fellows had a 
right to complain, certainly it was not the donkey. Now, 
in any country where such degradation of females could 
be tolerated by the state of manners, a woman of deli- 5 
cacy would shrink from acknowledging, either for herself 
or her friend, that she had ever been addicted to any mode 
of labor not strictly domestic ; because, if once owning 
herself a prsedial servant, she would be sensible that 
this confession extended by probability in the hearer's 10 
thoughts to the having incurred indignities of this 
horrible kind. Haumette clearly thinks it more digni- 
fied for Joanna to have been darning the stockings of 
her horny-hoofed father, Monsieur d'Arc, than keeping 
sheep, lest she might then be suspected of having ever 15 
done something worse. But, luckily, there was no 
danger of that : Joanna never was in service; and my 
opinion is that her father should have mended his own 
stockings, since probably he was the party to make holes 
in them, as many a better man than d'Arc does ; mean- 20 
ing by that not myself, because, though probably a bet- 
ter man than d'Arc, I protest against doing anything 
of the kind. If I lived even with Friday in Juan Fernan- 
dez, either Friday must do all the darning, or else it 
must go undone. The better men that I meant were the 25 
sailors in the British navy, every man of whom mends 
his own stockings. Who else is to do it ? Do you 
suppose, reader, that the junior lords of the admiralty 
are under articles to darn for the navy ? 

The reason, meantime, for my systematic hatred of 



44 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

d'Arc is this : There was a story current in France 
before the Revolution, framed to ridicule the pauper aris- 
tocracy, who happened to have long pedigrees and short 
rent rolls ; viz., that a head of such a house, dating from 

5 the Crusades, was overheard saying to his son, a Cheva- 
lier of St. Louis, " Chevalier, as-tu donne au cochon a 
manger ? " Now, it is clearly made out by the surviving 
evidence that d'Arc would much have preferred continu- 
ing to say, " Ma fille, as-tu donne au coehon a manger ? " 

10 to saying, " Pucelle d' Orleans, as-tu sauve les fleurs-de- 
lis ? " There is an old English copy of verses which 
argues thus : — 

" If the man that turnips cries 
Cry not when his father dies — 
Then 'tis plain the man had rather 
Have a turnip than his father." 

I cannot say that the logic in these verses was ever 
entirely to my satisfaction. I do not see my way through 

15 it as clearly as could be wished. But I see my way 
more clearly through d'Arc; and the result is — that he 
would greatly have preferred not merely a turnip to his 
father, but saving a pound or so of bacon to saving the 
Oriflamme of France. 

20 It is probable (as M. Michelet suggests) that the title 
of Virgin, or Pucelle, had in itself, and apart from the 
miraculous stories about her, a secret power over the 
rude soldiery and partisan chiefs of that period ; for, in 
such a person, they saw a representative manifestation 



JOAN OF ARC. 45 

of the Virgin Mary, who in a course of centuries, had 
grown steadily upon the popular heart. 

As to Joanna's supernatural detection of the dauphin 
(Charles VII.) amongst three hundred lords and knights, 
I am surprised at the credulity which could ever lend 5 
itself to that theatrical juggle. Who admires more 
than myself the sublime enthusiasm, the rapturous faith 
in herself, of this pure creature ? But I am far from ' 
admiring stage artifices, which not La Pucelle, but the 
court, must have arranged ; nor can I surrender myself 10 
to the conjurer's legerdemain, such as may be seen every 
day for a shilling. Southey's " Joan of Arc " was pub- 
lished in 1796. Twenty years after, talking with Southey, 
I was surprised to find him still owning a secret bias 
in favor of Joan, founded on her detection of the 15 
dauphin. The story, for the benefit of the reader new 
to the case, was this : La Pucelle was first made known 
to the dauphin, and presented to his court, at Chinon : 
and here came her first trial. By way of testing her 
supernatural pretensions, she was to find out the royal 20 
personage amongst the whole ark of clean and unclean 
creatures. Failing in this coup d'essai, she would not 
simply disappoint many a beating heart in the glittering 
crowd that on different motives yearned for her success, 
but she would ruin herself — and, as the oracle within 25 
had told her, would, by ruining herself, ruin France. 
Our own sovereign lady Victoria rehearses annually a 
trial not so severe in degree, but the same in kind. She 
" pricks " for sheriffs. Joanna pricked for a king. 
But observe the difference : our own lady pricks for two 



46 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

men out of three ; Joanna for one man out of three 
hundred. Happy Lady of the islands and the orient ! — 
she can go astray in her choice only by one half ; to the 
extent of one half she must have the satisfaction of 

5 being right. And yet, even with these tight limits to 
the misery of a boundless discretion, permit me, liege 
Lady, with all loyalty, to submit — that now and then 
you prick with your pin the wrong man. But the poor 
child from Domremy, shrinking under the gaze of a 

10 dazzling court — not because dazzling (for in visions she 
had seen those that were more so), but because some of 
them wore a scoffing smile on their features — how 
should she throw her line into so deep a river to angle 
for a king, where many a gay creature was sporting that 

15 masqueraded as kings in dress ? Nay, even more than 
any true king would have done : for, in Southey's ver- 
sion of the story, the dauphin says, by way of trying 
the virgin's magnetic sympathy with royalty, — 

"On the throne, 
I the while mingling with the menial throng, 
Some courtier shall be seated." 

This usurper is even crowned: "the jewelled crown 
20 shines on a menial's head." But, really, that is " un 

peu fort ; " and the mob of spectators might raise a 

scruple whether our friend the jackdaw upon the throne, 
' and the dauphin himself, were not grazing the shins of 

treason. For the dauphin could not lend more than 
25 belonged to him. According to the popular notion, he 

had no crown for himself ; consequently none to lend, 



JOAN OF ARC, 47 

on any pretense whatever, until the consecrated Maid 
should take him to Rheims. This was the popular 
notion in France. But, certainly, it was the dauphin's 
interest to support the popular notion, as he meant to 
use the services of Joanna. For, if he were king already, 5 
what was it that she could do for him beyond Orleans ? 
That is to say, what more than a mere military service 
could she render him ? And, above all, if he were king 
without a coronation, and without the oil from the 
sacred ampulla, what advantage was yet open to him by 10 
celerity above his competitor the English boy ? Now 
was to be a race for a coronation : he that should win 
that race, carried the superstition of France along with 
him : he that should first be drawn from the ovens of 
Rheims, was under that superstition baked into a king. 15 

La Pucelle, before she could be allowed to practise as 
a warrior, was put through her manual and platoon ex- 
ercise, as a pupil in divinity, at the bar of six eminent 
men in wigs. According to Southey (v. 393, Book III., 
in the original edition of his " Joan of Arc "), she 20 
" appalled the doctors." It's not easy to do that : but they 
had some reason to feel bothered, as that surgeon would 
assuredly feel bothered, who, upon proceeding to dissect 
a subject, should find the subject retaliating as a dis- 
sector upon himself, especially if Joanna ever made the 25 
speech to them which occupies v. 354-391, B. III. It is 
a double impossibility : 1st, because a piracy from Tin- 
dal's " Christianity as Old as the Creation " — a piracy 
a parte ante, and by three centuries; 21y, it is quite 
contrary to the evidence on Joanna's trial. Southey 's 



48 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

"Joan," of a.d. 1796 (Cottle, Bristol), tells the doctors, 
among other secrets, that she never in her life attended 
— 1st, Mass; nor 2d, the Sacramental table; nor 3d, 
Confession. In the mean time, all this deistical confes- 

5 sion of Joanna's, besides being suicidal for the interest 
of her cause, is opposed to the depositions upon both 
trials. The very best witness called from first to last 
deposes that Joanna attended these rites of her Church 
even too often ; was taxed with doing so ; and, by blush- 

10 ing, owned the charge as a fact, though certainly not as 

a fault. Joanna was a girl of natural piety, that saw 

God in forests, and hills, and fountains ; but did not the 

less seek him in chapels and consecrated oratories. 

This peasant girl was self-educated through her own 

15 natural meditativeness. If the reader turns to that divine 
passage in " Paradise Kegained," which Milton has put 
into the mouth of our Saviour when first entering the 
wilderness, and musing upon the tendency of those 
great impulses growing within himself, — 

" Oh, what a multitude of thoughts at once 
Awaken' d in me swarm, while I consider 
What from within I feel myself, and hear 
What from without comes often to my ears, 
111 sorting with my present state compared ! 
When I was yet a child, no childish play 
To me was pleasing ; all my mind was set 
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do 
What might be public good ; myself 1 thought 
Born to that end " — 

20 he will have some notion of the vast reveries which 
brooded over the heart of Joanna in early girlhood, 



JOAN OF ARC, 49 

when the wings were budding that should carry her from 
Orleans to Bheims ; when the golden chariot was dimly 
revealing itself, that should carry her from the kingdom 
of France Delivered to the eternal kingdom. 

It is not requisite, for the honor of Joanna, nor is 5 
there, in this place, room to pursue her brief career of 
action. That, though wonderful, forms the earthly part 
of her story : the spiritual part is the saintly passion of 
her imprisonment, trial, and execution. It is unfortu- 
nate, therefore, for Southey's " Joan of Arc " (which, 10 
however, should always be regarded as a juvenile effort), 
that, precisely when her real glory begins, the poem 
ends. But this limitation of the interest grew, no doubt, 
from the constraint inseparably attached to the law of 
epic unity. Joanna's history bisects into two opposite 15 
hemispheres, and both could not have been presented to 
the eye in one poem, unless by sacrificing all unity of 
theme, or else by involving the earlier half, as a narra- 
tive episode, in the latter ; which, however, might have 
been done, for it might have been communicated to a 20 
fellow-prisoner, or a confessor, by Joanna herself. It is 
sufficient, as concerns this section of Joanna's life, to 
say that she fulfilled, to the height of her promises, the 
restoration of the prostrate throne. France had become 
a province of England ; and for the ruin of both, if such 25 
a yoke could be maintained. Dreadful pecuniary ex- 
haustion caused the English energy to droop ; and that 
critical opening La Pucelle used with a corresponding 
felicity of audacity and suddenness (that were in them- 
selves portentous) for introducing the wedge of French 



50 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

native resources, for rekindling the national pride, and 
for planting the dauphin once more upon his feet. When 
Joanna appeared, he had been on the point of giving up 
the struggle with the English, distressed as they were, 

5 and of flying to the south of France. She taught him 
to blush for such abject counsels. She liberated Orleans, 
that great city, so decisive by its fate for the issue of the 
war, and then beleaguered by the English with an elab- 
orate application of engineering skill unprecedented in 

10 Europe. Entering the city after sunset, on the 29th of 
April, she sang mass on Sunday, May 8, for the entire 
disappearance of the besieging force. On the 29th of 
June, she fought and gained over the English the de- 
cisive battle of Patay; on the 9th of July, she took 

15 Troyes by a coup-de-main from a mixed garrison of 
English and Burgundians ; on the 15th of that month, 
she carried the dauphin into Rheims ; on Sunday the 
17th, she crowned him ; and there she rested from her 
labor of triumph. All that was to be done she had now 

20 accomplished : what remained was — to suffer. 

All this forward movement was her own: excepting 
one man, the whole council was against her. Her 
enemies were all that drew power from earth. Her sup- 
porters were her own strong enthusiasm, and the head- 

25 long contagion by which she carried this sublime frenzy 
into the hearts of women, of soldiers, and of all who 
lived by labor. Henceforwards she was thwarted ; and 
the worst error she committed was, to lend the sanction 
of her presence to counsels which she had ceased to 
approve. But she had now accomplished the capital 



JOAN OF ARC. 51 

objects which her own visions had dictated. These in- 
volved all the rest. Errors were now less important; 
and doubtless it had now become more difficult for her- 
self to pronounce authentically what were errors. The 
noble girl had achieved, as by a rapture of motion, the 5 
capital end of clearing out a free space around her sover- 
eign, giving him the power to move his arms with effect; 
and, secondly, the inappreciable end of winning for that 
sovereign what seemed to all France the heavenly ratifi- 
cation of his rights, by crowning him with the ancient 10 
solemnities. She had made it impossible for the Eng- 
lish now to step before her. They were caught in an 
irretrievable blunder, owing partly to discord amongst 
the uncles of Henry VI., partly to a want of funds, but 
partly to the very impossibility which they believed to 15 
press with tenfold force upon any French attempt to 
forestall theirs. They laughed at such a thought ; and 
whilst they laughed, she did it. Henceforth the single 
redress for the English of this capital oversight, but 
which never could have redressed it effectually, was, to 20 
vitiate and taint the coronation of Charles VII. as the 
work of a witch. That policy, and not malice (as M. 
Michelet is so happy to believe), was the moving prin- 
ciple in the subsequent prosecution of Joanna. Unless 
they unhinged the force of the first coronation in the 25 
popular mind, by associating it with power given from 
hell, they felt that the sceptre of the invader was broken. 
But she, the child that, at nineteen, had wrought won- 
ders so great for France, was she not elated ? Did she 
not lose, as men so often have lost, all sobriety of mind 



52 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 

when standing upon the pinnacle of success so giddy 1 
Let her enemies declare. During the progress of hei 
movement, and in the centre of ferocious struggles, she 
had manifested the temper of her feelings, by the pity 
5 which she had everywhere expressed for the suffering 
enemy. She forwarded to the English leaders a touching 
invitation to unite with the French, as brothers, in a 
common crusade against infidels, thus opening the road 
for a soldierly retreat. She interposed to protect the 

10 captive or the wounded — she mourned over the excesses 
of her countrymen — she threw herself off her horse to 
kneel by the dying English soldier, and to comfort him 
with such ministrations, physical or spiritual, as his 
situation allowed. Nolebat, says the evidence, uti 

15 ense suo, aid quemquam interficere. She sheltered 
the English, that invoked her aid, in her own quarters. 
She wept as she beheld, stretched on the field of battle, 
so many brave enemies that had died without confession. 
And, as regarded herself, her elation expressed itself 

20 thus : — On the day when she had finished her work, she 
wept ; for she knew that, when her triumphal task was 
done, her end must be approaching. Her aspirations 
pointed only to a place, which seemed to her more than 
usually full of natural piety, as one in which it would 

25 give her pleasure to die. And she uttered, between 
smiles and tears, as a wish that inexpressibly fascinated 
her heart, and yet was half-fantastic, a broken prayer, 
that God would return her ta the solitudes from which 
he had drawn her, and suffer her to become a shepherdess 
once more. It was a natural prayer, because nature has 



JOAN OF ARC. 53 

laid a necessity upon every human heart to seek for rest, 
and to shrink from torment. Yet, again, it was a half- 
fantastic prayer, because, from childhood upwards, 
visions that she had no power to mistrust, and the 
voices which sounded in her ear forever, had long since 5 
persuaded her mind, that for her no such prayer could 
be granted. Too well she felt that her mission must be 
worked out to the end, and that the end was now at 
hand. All went wrong from this time. She herself had 
created the funds out of which the French restoration 10 
should grow ; but she was not suffered to witness their 
development, or their prosperous application. More than 
one military plan was entered upon which she did not 
approve. But she still continued to expose her person 
as before. Severe wounds had not taught her caution. 15 
And at length, in a sortie from Compeigne (whether 
through treacherous collusion on the part of her own 
friends is doubtful to this day), she was made prisoner 
by the Burgundians, and finally surrendered to the 
English. 20 

Now came her trial. This trial, moving of course 
under English influence, was conducted in chief by the 
Bishop of Beauvais. He was a Frenchman, sold to 
English interests, and hoping, by favor of the English 
leaders, to reach the highest preferment. Bishop that 25 
art, Archbishop that shalt be, Cardinal that mayest be, 
were the words that sounded continually in his ear ; and 
doubtless, a whisper of visions still higher, of a triple 
crown, and feet upon the necks of kings, sometimes 
stole into his heart. M. Michelet is anxious to keep us 



54 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

in mind that this bishop was but an agent of the English. 
True. But it does not better the case for his country- 
man — that, being an accomplice in the crime, making 
himself a leader in the persecution against the helpless 
5 girl, he was willing to be all this in the spirit, and with 
the conscious vileness of a cat's-paw. Never from the 
foundations of the earth was there such a trial as this, 
if it were laid open in all its beauty of defence, and all 
its hellishness of attack. Oh, child of France ! shep- 

10 herdess, peasant girl ! trodden under foot by all around 
thee, how I honor thy flashing intellect, quick as God's 
lightning, and true as God's lightning, to its mark, 
that ran before France and laggard Europe by many 
a century, confounding the malice of the ensnarer, 

15 and making dumb the oracles of falsehood ! Is it 
not scandalous, is it not humiliating to civilization, 
that, even at this day, France exhibits the horrid spec- 
tacle of judges examining the prisoner against himself; 
seducing himself, by fraud, into treacherous conclusions 

20 against his own head ; using the terrors of their power 
for extorting confessions from the frailty of hope ; nay 
(which is worse), using the blandishments of con- 
descension and snaky kindness for thawing into com- 
pliances of gratitude those whom they had failed to 

25 freeze into terror ? Wicked judges ! Barbarian juris- 
prudence ! that, sitting in your own conceit on the 
summits of social wisdom, have yet failed to learn the 
first principles of criminal justice ; sit ye humbly and 
with docility at the feet of this girl from Domremy, 
that tore your webs of cruelty into shreds and dust. 



JOAN OF ARC. 55 

" Would you examine me as a witness against myself ? " 
was a question by which many times she defied their 
arts. Continually she showed that their interrogations 
were irrelevant to any business before the court, or that 
entered into the ridiculous charges against her. General 5 
questions were proposed to her on points of casuistical 
divinity ; two-edged questions, which not one of them- 
selves could have answered without, on the one side, 
landing himself in heresy (as then interpreted), or, on 
the other, in some presumptuous expression of self- 10 
esteem. Next came a wretched Dominican, that pressed 
her with an objection, which, if applied to the Bible 
would tax every one of its miracles with unsoundness. 
The monk had the excuse of never having read the 
Bible. M. Michelet has no such excuse ; and it makes 15 
one blush for him, as a philosopher, to find him describ- 
ing such an argument as " weighty," whereas it is but a 
varied expression of rude Mahometan metaphysics. 
Her answer to this, if there were room to place the whole 
in a clear light, was as shattering as it was rapid. 20 
Another thought to entrap her by asking what language 
the angelic visitors of her solitude had talked ; as though 
heavenly counsels could want polyglot interpreters for 
every word, or that God needed language at all in whis- 
pering thoughts to a human heart. Then came a worse 25 
devil, who asked her whether the archangel Michael 
had appeared naked. Not comprehending the vile insin- 
uation, Joanna, whose poverty suggested to her simpli- 
city that it might be the costliness of suitable robes 
which caused the demur, asked them if they fancied 



56 THOMAS BE QUINCEY. 

God, who clothed the flowers of the valleys, unable to 
find raiment for his servants. The answer of Joanna 
moves a smile of tenderness, but the disappointment of 
her judges makes one laugh exultingly. Others suc- 

5 ceeded by troops, who upbraided her with leaving her 
father ; as if that greater Father, whom she believed 
herself to have been serving, did not retain the power of 
dispensing with his own rules, or had not said, that, for 
a less cause than martyrdom, man and woman should 

10 leave both father and mother. 

On Easter Sunday, when the trial had been long pro- 
ceeding, the poor girl fell so ill as to cause a belief that 
she had been poisoned. It was not poison. Nobody had 
any interest in hastening a death so certain. M. Miche- 

15 let, whose sympathies with all feelings are so quick that 
one would gladly see them always as justly directed, 
reads the case most truly. Joanna had a twofold mal- 
ady. She was visited by a paroxysm of the complaint 
called homesickness; the cruel nature of her imprison- 

20 ment, and its length, could not but point her solitary 
thoughts, in darkness and in chains (for chained she was), 
to Domremy. And the season, which was the most heav- 
enly period of the spring, added stings to this yearning. 
This was one of her maladies — nostalgia, as medicine 

25 calls it ; the other was weariness and exhaustion from 
daily combats with malice. She saw that everybody 
hated her, and thirsted for her blood ; nay, many kind- 
hearted creatures that would have pitied her profoundly, 
as regarded all political charges, had their natural feel- 
ings warped by the belief that she had dealings with 



JOAN OF ARC. 57 

fiendish powers. She knew she was to die; that was 
not the misery : the misery was that this consummation 
could not be reached without so much intermediate strife, 
as if she were contending for some chance (where chance 
was none) of happiness, or were dreaming for a moment 5 
of escaping the inevitable. Why, then, did she contend ? 
Knowing that she would reap nothing from answering 
her persecutors, why did she not retire by silence from 
the superfluous contest ? It was because her quick and 
eager loyalty to truth would not suffer her to see it dark- 10 
ened by frauds, which she could expose, but others, even 
of candid listeners, perhaps could not ; it was through 
that imperishable grandeur of soul, which taught her to 
submit meekly and without a struggle to her punishment, 
but taught her not to submit — no, not for a moment — 15 
to calumny as to facts, or to misconstruction as to mo- 
tives. Besides, there were secretaries all around the 
court taking down her words. That was meant for no 
good to her. But the end does not always correspond to 
the meaning. And Joanna might say to herself : These 20 
words that will be used against me to-morrow and the 
next day, perhaps in some nobler generation may rise 
again for my justification. Yes, Joanna, they are rising 
even now in Paris, and for more than justification. 

Woman, sister — there are some things which you do 25 
not execute as well as your brother, man ; no, nor ever 
will. Pardon me, if I doubt whether you will ever pro- 
duce a great poet from your choirs, or a Mozart, or a 
Phidias, or a Michael Angelo, or a great philosopher, or 
a great scholar. By which last is meant — not one who 



58 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an 
infinite and electrical power of combination; bringing 
together from the four winds, like the angel of the res- 
urrection, what else were dust from dead men's bones, 
5 into the unity of breathing life. If you can create your- 
selves into any of these great creators, why have you 
not? 

Yet, sister, woman, though I cannot consent to find a 
Mozart or a Michael Angelo in your sex, cheerfully, and 

10 with the love that burns in depths of admiration, I ac- 
knowledge that you can do one thing as well as the best 
of us men — a greater thing than even Milton is known 
to have done, or Michael Angelo — you can die grandly, 
and as goddesses would die, were goddesses mortal. If 

15 any distant worlds (which may be the case) are so far 
ahead of us Tellurians in optical resources, as to see dis- 
tinctly through their telescopes all that we do on earth, 
what is the grandest sight to which we ever treat them ? 
St. Peter's at Rome, do you fancy, on Easter Sunday, or 

20 Luxor, or perhaps the Himalayas ? Oh, no ! my friend : 
suggest something better ; these are baubles to them ; 
they see in other worlds, in their own, far better toys of 
the same kind. These, take my word for it, are nothing. 
Do you give it up ? The finest thing, then, we have to 

25 show them, is a scaffold on the morning of execution. I 
assure you there is a strong muster in those far telescopic 
worlds, on any such morning, of those who happen to 
find themselves occupying the right hemisphere for a 
peep at us. How, then, if it be announced in some such 
telescopic world by those who make a livelihood of catch- 



JOAN OF ARC. 59 

ing glimpses at our newspapers, whose language they 
have long since deciphered, that the poor victim in the 
morning's sacrifice is a woman ? How, if it be published 
in that distant world, that the sufferer wears upon her 
head, in the eyes of many, the garlands of martyr- 5 
dom ? How, if it should be some Marie Antoinette, the 
widowed queen, coming forward on the scaffold, and 
presenting to the morning air her head turned gray by 
sorrow, daughter of Caesars kneeling down humbly to 
kiss the guillotine, as one that worships death ? How, 10 
if it were the noble Charlotte Corday, that in the bloom 
of youth, that with the loveliest of persons, that with 
homage waiting upon her smiles wherever she turned her 
face to scatter them — homage that followed those smiles 
as surely as the carols of birds, after showers in spring, 15 
follow the reappearing sun and the racing of sunbeams 
over the hills — yet thought all these things cheaper 
than the dust upon her sandals, in comparison of deliver- 
ance from hell for her dear suffering France ! Ah ! these 
were spectacles indeed for those sympathizing people in 20 
distant worlds ; and some perhaps would suffer a sort of 
martyrdom themselves, because they could not testify 
their wrath, could not bear witness to the strength of 
love and to the fury of hatred that burned within them 
at such scenes ; could not gather into golden urns some 25 
of that glorious dust which rested in the catacombs of 
earth. 

On the Wednesday after Trinity Sunday in 1431, 
being then about nineteen years of age, the Maid of Arc 
underwent her martyrdom. She was conducted before 



60 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

midday, guarded by eight hundred spearmen, to a plat- 
form of prodigious height, constructed of wooden billets 
supported by occasional walls of lath and plaster, and 
traversed by hollow spaces in every direction for the 

5 creation of air-currents. The pile " struck terror," says 
M. Michelet, " by its height ; " and, as usual, the English 
purpose in this is viewed as one of pure malignity. But 
there are two ways of explaining all that. It is probable 
that the purpose was merciful. On the circumstances of 

10 the execution I shall not linger. Yet, to mark the 
almost fatal felicity of M. Michelet in finding out what- 
ever may injure the English name, at a moment when 
every reader will be interested in Joanna's personal 
appearance, it is really edifying to notice the ingenuity 

15 by which he draws into light from a dark corner a very 
unjust account of it, and neglects, though lying upon 
the high-road, a very pleasing one. Both are from 
English pens. Grafton, a chronicler but little read, 
being a stiff-necked John Bull, thought fit to say that 

20 no wonder Joanna should be a virgin, since her " foule 
face " was a satisfactory solution of that particular 
merit. Holinshead, on the other hand, a chronicler 
somewhat later, every way more important, and at one 
time universally read, has given a very pleasing testi- 

25 mony to the interesting character of Joanna's person 
and engaging manners. Neither of these men lived till 
the following century, so that personally this evidence 
is none at all. Grafton sullenly and carelessly believed 
as he wished to believe ; Holinshead took pains to 
inquire, and reports undoubtedly the general impres- 



JOAN OF ARC. 61 

sion of France. But I cite the case as illustrating M. 
Michelet's candor. 

The circumstantial incidents of the execution, unless 
with more space than I can now command, I should be 
unwilling to relate. I should fear to injure, by im- 5 
perfect report, a martyrdom which to myself appears so 
unspeakably grand. Yet for a purpose, pointing not at 
Joanna, but M. Michelet, — viz., to convince him that 
an Englishman is capable of thinking more highly of 
La Pucelle than even her admiring countryman, — 10 
I shall, in parting, allude to one or two traits in 
Joanna's demeanor on the scaffold, and to one or two in 
that of the bystanders, which authorize me in question- 
ing an opinion of his upon this martyr's firmness. The 
reader ought to be reminded that Joanna d'Arc was sub- 15 
jected to an unusually unfair trial of opinion. Any of 
the elder Christian martyrs had not much to fear of 
personal rancor. The martyr was chiefly regarded as 
the enemy of Caesar ; at times, also, where any knowl- 
edge of the Christian faith and morals existed, with the 20 
enmity that arises spontaneously in the worldly against 
the spiritual. But the martyr, though disloyal, was not 
supposed to be, therefore, anti-national ; and still less 
was individually hateful. What was hated (if anything) 
belonged to his class, not to himself separately. Now, 25 
Joanna, if hated at all, was hated personally, and in 
Eouen on national grounds. Hence there would be a 
certainty of calumny arising against her, such as would 
not affect martyrs in general. That being the case, it 
would follow of necessity that some people would im- 



62 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

pute to her a willingness to recant. No innocence could 
escape that. Now, had she really testified this willing- 
ness on the scaffold, it would have argued nothing at all 
but the weakness of a genial nature shrinking from the 

5 instant approach of torment. And those will often pity 
that weakness most, who, in their own persons, would 
yield to it least. Meantime, there never was a calumny 
uttered that drew less support from the recorded cir- 
cumstances. It rests upon no positive testimony, and it 

10 has a weight of contradicting testimony to stem. And 
yet, strange to say, M. Michelet, who at times seems to 
admire the Maid of Arc as much as I do, is the one sole 
writer amongst her friends who lends some countenance 
to this odious slander. His words are that, if she did 

15 not utter this word recant with her lips, she uttered it 
in her heart. " Whether she said the word is uncertain ; 
but I affirm that she thought it." 

Now, I affirm that she did not ; not in any sense of 
the word "thought" applicable to the case. Here is 

20 France calumniating La Pucelle : here is England de- 
fending her. M. Michelet can only mean that, on a pri- 
ori principles, every woman must be liable to such a 
weakness : that Joanna was a woman ; ergo, that she 
was liable to such a weakness. That is, he only sup- 

25 poses her to have uttered the word by an argument 
which presumes it impossible for anybody to have done 
otherwise. I, on the contrary, throw the onus of the 
argument not on presumable tendencies of nature, but 
on the known facts of that morning's execution, as 
recorded by multitudes. What else, I demand, than 



JOAN OF ARC. 63 

mere weight of metal, absolute nobility of deportment, 
broke the vast line of battle then arrayed against her ? 
What else but her meek, saintly demeanor won from the 
enemies, that till now had believed her a witch, tears of 
rapturous admiration ? " Ten thousand men," says M. 5 
Michelet himself, " ten thousand men wept ; " and of 
these ten thousand the majority were political enemies 
knitted together by cords of superstition. What else 
was it but her constancy, united with her angelic gentle- 
ness, that drove the frantic English soldier — who had 10 
sworn to throw a fagot on her scaffold, as his tribute 
of abhorrence, that did so, that fulfilled his vow — sud- 
denly to turn away a penitent for life, saying every- 
where that he had seen a dove rising upon wings to 
heaven from the ashes where she had stood ? What 15 
else drove the executioner to kneel at every shrine for 
pardon to his share in the tragedy ? And if all this were 
insufficient, then I cite the closing act of her life, as 
valid on her behalf, were all other testimonies against 
her. The executioner had been directed to apply his 20 
torch from below. He did so. The fiery smoke rose 
upwards in billowing volumes. A Dominican monk was 
then standing almost at her side. Wrapped up in his 
sublime office, he saw not the danger, but still 'persisted 
in his prayers. Even then, when the last enemy was 25 
racing up the fiery stairs to seize her, even at that mo- 
ment did this noblest of girls think only for him, the 
one friend that would not forsake her, and not for her- 
self ; bidding him with her last breath to care for his 
own preservation, but to leave her to God. That girl, 



64 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

whose latest breath, ascended in this sublime expression 
of self-oblivion, did not utter the word recant either 
with her lips or in her heart. No ; she did not, though 
one should rise from the dead to swear it. 

5 ...... 

Bishop of Beauvais ! thy victim died in fire upon a 
scaffold, — thou upon a down bed. But for the depart- 
ing minutes of life, both are oftentimes alike. At the 
farewell crisis, when the gates of death are opening, and 

10 flesh is resting from its struggles, oftentimes the tor- 
tured and torturer have the same truce from carnal tor- 
ment ; both sink together into sleep ; together both, 
sometimes, kindle into dreams. When the mortal mists 
were gathering fast upon you two, bishop and shepherd 

15 girl — when the pavilions of life were closing up their 
shadowy curtains about you — let us try, through the 
gigantic glooms, to decipher the flying features of your 
separate visions. 

The shepherd girl that had delivered France — she, 

20 from her dungeon, she, from her baiting at the stake, 
she, from her duel with fire, as she entered her last 
dream — saw Domremy, saw the fountain of Domremy, 
saw the pomp of forests in which her childhood had 
wandered. The Easter festival, which man had denied 

25 to her languishing heart — that resurrection of spring- 
time, which the darkness of dungeons had intercepted 
from her, hungering after the glorious liberty of forests — 
were by God given back into her hands, as jewels that 
had been stolen from her by robbers. With those, per- 
haps (for the minutes of dreams can stretch into ages), 



JOAN OF ARC. 65 

was given back to her by God the bliss of childhood. 
By special privilege, for her might be created, in this 
farewell dream, a second childhood, innocent as the first ; 
bnt not, like that, sad with the gloom of a fearful mis- 
sion in the rear. The mission had now been fulfilled. 5 
The storm was weathered, the skirts even of that mighty 
storm were drawing off. The blood that she was to 
reckon for had been exacted ; the tears that she was to 
shed in secret had been paid to the last. The hatred 
to herself in all eyes had been faced steadily, had been 10 
suffered, had been survived. And in her last fight upon 
the scaffold she had triumphed gloriously ; victoriously 
she had tasted the stings of death. For all, except this 
comfort from her farewell dream, she had died — died, 
amidst the tears of ten thousand enemies — died, amidst 15 
the drums and trumpets of armies — died, amidst peals 
redoubling upon peals, volleys upon volleys, from the 
saluting clarions of martyrs. 

Bishop of Beauvais ! because the gilt-burdened man is 
in dreams haunted and waylaid by the most frightful of 20 
his crimes, and because upon that fluctuating mirror — 
rising (like the mocking mirrors of mirage in Arabian 
deserts) from the fens of death — most of all are re- 
flected the sweet countenances which the man has laid 
in ruins ; therefore I know, bishop, that you also, enter- 25 
ing your final dream, saw Domremy. That fountain, of 
which the witnesses spoke so much, showed itself to your 
eyes in pure morning dews : but neither dews, nor the 
holy dawn, could cleanse away the bright spots of inno- 
cent blood upon its surface. By the fountain, bishop, you 



66 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

saw a woman seated, that hid her face. But as you draw 
near, the woman raises her wasted features. Would 
Domremy know them again for the features of her child ? 
Ah, but you know them, bishop, well ! Oh, mercy ! 

5 what a groan was that which the servants, waiting out- 
side the bishop's dream at his bedside, heard from his 
laboring heart, as at this moment he turned away from 
the fountain and the woman, seeking rest in the forests 
afar off. Yet not so to escape the woman, whom once 

10 again he must behold before he dies. In the forests to 
which he prays for pity, will he find a respite ? What 
a tumult, what a gathering of feet is there ! In glades, 
where only wild deer should run, armies and nations are 
assembling ; towering in the fluctuating crowd are phan- 

15 toms that belong to departed hours. There is the great 
English Prince, Regent of France. There is my Lord 
of Winchester, the princely cardinal, that died and made 
no sign. There is the Bishop of Beauvais, clinging to 
the shelter of thickets. What building is that which 

20 hands so rapid are raising ? Is it a martyr's scaffold ? 
Will they burn the child of Domremy a second time ? 
No : it is a tribunal that rises to the clouds ; and two 
nations stand around it, waiting for a trial. Shall my 
Lord of Beauvais sit again upon the judgment-seat, and 

25 again number the hours for the innocent ? Ah ! no : he 
is the prisoner at the bar. Already all is waiting : the 
mighty audience is gathered, the Court is hurrying to 
their seats, the witnesses are arrayed, the trumpets are 
sounding, the judge is taking his place. Oh ! but this is 
sudden. My Lord, have you no counsel ? " Counsel I 



JOAN OF ARC, 67 

have none : in heaven above, or on earth beneath, coun- 
sellor there is none now that would take a brief from me : 
all are silent." Is it, indeed, come to this ? Alas, the 
time is short, the tumult is wondrous, the crowd stretches 
away into infinity, but yet I will search in it for some- 5 
body to take your brief : I know of somebody that will 
be your counsel. Who is this that cometh from Dom- 
reiny ? Who is she in bloody coronation robes from 
Eheims ? Who is she that cometh with blackened flesh 
from walking the furnaces of Rouen ? This is she, the 10 
shepherd girl, counsellor that had none for herself, whom 
I choose, bishop, for yours. She it is, I engage, that 
shall take my lord's brief. She it is, bishop, that would 
plead for you: yes, bishop, she — when heaven and 
earth are silent. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 



SECTION THE FIRST. 

THE GLORY OF MOTION. 

Some twenty or more years before I matriculated at 
Oxford, Mr. Palmer, at that time M.P. for Bath, had 
accomplished two things, very hard to do on our little 
planet the Earth, however cheap they may be held by 
5 eccentric people in comets — he had invented mail- 
coaches, and he had married the daughter of a duke. 
He was, therefore, just twice as great a man as Galileo, 
who did certainly invent (or, which is the same thing, 
discover) the satellites of Jupiter, those very next 

10 things extant to mail-coaches in the two capital preten- 
sions of speed and keeping time, but, on the other hand, 
who did not marry the daughter of a duke. 

These mail-coaches, as organized by Mr. Palmer, are 
entitled to a circumstantial notice from myself, having 

15 had so large a share in developing the anarchies of my 
subsequent dreams ; an agency which they accomplished, 
first, through velocity, at that time unprecedented — for 
they first revealed the glory of motion ; secondly, 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 69 

through grand effects for the eye between lamp-light 
and the darkness upon solitary roads ; thirdly, through 
animal beauty and power so often displayed in the class 
of horses selected for this mail service; fourthly, 
through the conscious presence of a central intellect, 5 
that, in the midst of vast distances — of storms, of 
darkness, of danger — overruled all obstacles into one 
steady co-operation to a national result. For my own 
feeling, this post-office service spoke as by some mighty 
orchestra, where a thousand instruments, all disregard- 10 
ing each other, and so far in danger of discord, yet all 
obedient as slaves to the supreme baton of some great 
leader, terminate in a perfection of harmony like that 
of heart, brain, and lungs, in a healthy animal organiza- 
tion. But, finally, that particular element in this whole 15 
combination which most impressed myself, and through 
which it is that to this hour Mr. Palmer's mail-coach 
system tyrannizes over my dreams by terror and terrific 
beauty, lay in the awful political mission which at that 
time it fulfilled. The mail-coach it was that distributed 2° 
over the face of the land, like the opening of apocalyp- 
tic vials, the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, of Sala- 
manca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo. These were the 
harvests that, in the grandeur of their reaping, re- 
deemed the tears and blood in which they had been 25 
sown. Neither was the meanest peasant so much below 
the grandeur and the sorrow of the times as to confound 
battles such as these, which were gradually moulding 
the destinies of Christendom, with the vulgar conflicts 
of ordinary warfare, so often no more than gladiatorial 



70 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 

trials of national prowess. The victories of England 
in this stupendous contest rose of themselves as natural 
Te Deums to heaven ; and it was felt by the thoughtful 
that such victories, at such a crisis of general prostra- 
5 tion, were not more beneficial to ourselves than finally 
to France, our enemy, and to the nations of all western 
or central Europe, through whose pusillanimity it was 
that the French domination had prospered. 

The modern modes of travelling cannot compare with 

10 the old mail-coach system in grandeur and power. They 
boast of more velocity, not, however, as a consciousness, 
but as a fact of oar lifeless knowledge, resting upon 
alien evidence ; as, for instance, because somebody says 
that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, though we are 

15 far from feeling it as a personal experience, or upon the 
evidence of a result, as that actually we find ourselves 
in York four hours after leaving London. Apart from 
such an assertion, or such a result, I myself am little 
aware of the pace. But, seated on the old mail-coach, 

20 we needed no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the 
velocity. On this system the word was, Non magna 
loquimur, as upon railways, but vivimus. Yes, " magna 
vivimus ; " we do not make verbal ostentation of our 
grandeurs, we realize our grandeurs in act, and in the 

25 very experience of life. The vital experience of the 
glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on 
the question of our speed ; we heard our speed, we saw 
it, we felt it as a thrilling ; and this speed was not the 
product of blind insensate agencies that had no sympa- 
thy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 71 

the noblest among brutes, in his dilated nostril, spas- 
modic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs. The sensi- 
bility of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light 
of his eye, might be the last vibration of such a move- 
ment ; the glory of Salamanca might be the first. But 5 
the intervening links that connected them, that spread 
the earthquake of battle into the eyeball of the horse, 
were the heart of man and its electric thrillings — 
kindling in the rapture of the fiery strife, and then prop- 
agating its own tumults by contagious shouts and 10 
gestures to the heart of his servant the horse. 

But now, on the new system of travelling, iron tubes 
and boilers have disconnected man's heart from the 
ministers of his locomotion. Nile nor Trafalgar has 
power to raise an extra bubble in a steam-kettle. The 15 
galvanic cycle is broken up forever; man's imperial 
nature no longer sends itself forward through the elec- 
tric sensibility of the horse ; the inter-agencies are gone 
in the mode of communication between the horse and 
his master, out of which grew so many aspects of sub- 20 
limity under accidents of mists that hid, or sudden 
blazes that revealed, of mobs that agitated, or midnight 
solitudes that awed. Tidings, fitted to convulse all 
nations, must henceforwards travel by culinary process ; 
and the trumpet that once announced from afar the 25 
laurelled mail, heart-shaking when heard screaming on 
the wind, and proclaiming itself through the darkness 
to every village or solitary house on its route, has 
now given way forever to the pot-wallopings of the 
boiler. 



72 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 



GOING DOWN WITH VICTORY. 

But the grandest chapter of our experience, within 
the whole mail-coach service, was on those occasions 
when we went down from London with the news of vic- 
tory. A period of about ten years stretched from Tra- 

5 falgar to Waterloo : the second and third years of which 
period (1806 and 1807) were comparatively sterile ; but 
the other nine (from 1805 to 1815 inclusively) furnished 
a long succession of victories ; the least of which, in 
such a contest of Titans, had an inappreciable value of 

10 position — partly for its absolute interference with the 
plans of our enemy, but still more from its keeping alive 
through central Europe the sense of a deep-seated vul- 
nerability in France. Even to tease the coasts of our 
enemy, to mortify them by continual blockades, to 

15 insult them by capturing if it were but a baubling 
schooner under the eyes of their arrogant armies, re- 
peated from time to time a sullen proclamation of power 
lodged in one quarter to which the hopes of Christen- 
dom turned in secret. How much more loudly must this 

20 proclamation have spoken in the audacity of having 
bearded the elite of their troops, and having beaten them 
in pitched battles ! Five years of life it was worth pay- 
ing down for the privilege of an outside place on a mail- 
coach, when carrying down the first tidings of any such 

25 event. And it is to be noted that, from our insular sit- 
uation, and the multitude of our frigates disposable for 
the rapid transmission of intelligence, rarely did an 
unauthorized rumor steal away a prelibation from the 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 73 

first aroma of the regular despatches. The government 
news was generally the earliest news. 

From eight p.m. to fifteen or twenty minutes later, 
imagine the mails assembled on parade in Lombard 
Street, where, at that time, and not in St. Martin's-le- 5 
Grand, was seated the General Post-office. In what 
exact strength we mustered I do not remember; but, 
from the length of each separate attelage, we filled the 
street, though a long one, and though we were drawn up 
in double file. On any night the spectacle was beautiful. 10 
The absolute perfection of all the appointments about 
the carriages and the harness, their strength, their bril- 
liant cleanliness, their beautiful simplicity — but, more 
than all, the royal magnificence of the horses — were 
what might first have fixed the attention. Every car- 15 
riage, on every morning in the year, was taken down to 
an official inspector for examination — wheels, axles, 
linchpins, pole, glasses, lamps, were all critically probed 
and tested. Every part of every carriage had been 
cleaned, every horse had been groomed, with as much 20 
rigor as if they belonged to a private gentleman ; and 
that part of the spectacle offered itself always. But 
the night before us is a night of victory ; and, behold ! 
to the ordinary display, what a heart-shaking addition ! — 
horses, men, carriages, all are dressed in laurels and 25 
flowers, oak-leaves and ribbons. The guards, as being 
officially His Majesty's servants, and of the coachmen 
such as are within the privilege of the post-office, wear 
the royal liveries of course ; and as it is summer (for all 
the land victories were naturally won in summer), they 



74 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

wear, on this fine evening, these liveries exposed to view, 
without any covering of upper coats. Such a costume, 
and the elaborate arrangement of the laurels in their 
hats, dilate their hearts, by giving to them openly a per- 

5 sonal connection with the great news, in which already 
they have the general interest of patriotism. That 
great national sentiment surmounts and quells all sense 
of ordinary distinctions. Those passengers who happen 
to be gentlemen are now hardly to be distinguished as 

10 such except by dress ; for the usual reserve of their man- 
ner in speaking to the attendants has on this night 
melted away. One heart, one pride, one glory, connects 
every man by the transcendent bond of his national 
blood. The spectators, who are numerous beyond pre- 

15 cedent, express their sympathy with these fervent feel- 
ings by continual hurrahs. Every moment are shouted 
aloud by the post-office servants, and summoned to draw 
up, the great ancestral names of cities known to history 
through a thousand years — Lincoln, Winchester, Ports- 

20 mouth, Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, York, 
Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Stirling, Aber- 
deen — expressing the grandeur of the empire by the 
antiquity of its towns, and the grandeur of the mail 
establishment by the diffusive radiation of its separate 

25 missions. Every moment you hear the thunder of lids 
locked down upon the mail-bags. That sound to each 
individual mail is the signal for drawing off, which pro- 
cess is the finest part of the entire spectacle. Then 
come the horses into play. Horses ! can these be horses 
that bound of! with the action and gestures of leopards ? 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 75 

What stir ! — what sea-like ferment ! — what a thunder- 
ing of wheels ! — what a trampling of hoofs ! — what a 
sounding of trumpets ! — what farewell cheers ! — what 
redoubling peals of brotherly congratulation, connecting 
the name of the particular mail — " Liverpool forever ! " 5 
— with the name of the particular victory — "Badajoz 
forever ! " or " Salamanca forever ! " The half-slumber- 
ing consciousness that, all night long, and all the next 
day — perhaps for even a longer period — many of these 
mails, like fire racing along a train of gunpowder, will 10 
be kindling at every instant new successions of burning 
joy, has an obscure effect of multiplying the victory 
itself, by multiplying to the imagination into infinity 
the stages of its progressive diffusion. A fiery arrow 
seems to be let loose, which from that moment is des- 15 
tined to travel, without intermission, westwards for three 
hundred miles — northwards for six hundred ; and the 
sympathy of our Lombard Street friends at parting is 
exalted a hundred-fold by a sort of visionary sympathy 
with the yet slumbering sympathies which in so vast a 20 
succession we are going to awake. 

Liberated from the embarrassments of the City, and 
issuing into the broad uncrowded avenues of the north- 
ern suburbs, we soon begin to enter upon our natural 
pace of ten miles an hour. In the broad light of the 25 
summer evening, the sun, perhaps, only just at the point 
of setting, we are seen from every story of every house. 
Heads of every age crowd to the windows — young and 
old understand the language of our victorious sym- 
bols — and rolling volleys of sympathizing cheers run 



76 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

along us, behind us, and before us. The beggar, rearing 
himself against the wall, forgets his lameness — real or 
assumed — thinks not of his whining trade, but stands 
erect, with bold, exulting smiles, as we pass him. The 

5 victory has healed him, and says, Be thou whole ! 
Women and children, from garrets alike and cellars, 
through infinite London, look down or look up with 
loving eyes upon our gay ribbons and our martial laurels : 
sometimes kiss their hands ; sometimes hang out, as sig- 

10 nals of affection, pocket-handkerchiefs, aprons, dusters, 
anything that, by catching the summer breezes, will 
express an aerial jubilation. On the London side of 
Barnet, to which we draw near within a few minutes 
after nine, observe that private carriage which is ap- 

15 proaching us. The weather being so warm, the glasses 
are all down ; and one may read, as on the stage of a 
theatre, everything that goes on within. It contains 
three ladies — one likely to be "mamma," and two of 
seventeen or eighteen, who are probably her daughters. 

20 What lovely animation, what beautiful unpremeditated 
pantomime, explaining to us every syllable that passes 
in these ingenuous girls. By the sudden start and rais- 
ing of the hands, on first discovering our laurelled equi- 
page ! — by the sudden movement and appeal to the 

25 elder lady from both of them — and by the heightened 
color on their animated countenances, we can almost hear 
them saying, " See, see ! Look at their laurels ! Oh, 
mamma ! there has been a great battle in Spain ; and it 
has been a great victory." In a moment we are on the 
point of passing them. We passengers — I on the box, 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 77 

and the two on the roof behind me — raised our hats to 
the ladies; the coachman makes his professional salute 
with the whip ; the guard even, though punctilious on 
the matter of his dignity as an officer under the crown, 
touches his hat. The ladies move to us, in return, with 5 
a winning graciousness of gesture ; all smile on each 
side in a way that nobody could misunderstand, and that 
nothing short of a grand national sympathy could so 
instantaneously prompt. Will these ladies say that we 
are nothing to them ? Oh, no ; they will not say that. 10 
They cannot deny — they do not deny — that for this 
night they are our sisters ; gentle or simple, scholar or 
illiterate servant, for twelve hours to come, we on the 
outside have the honor to be their brothers. Those poor 
women, again, who stop to gaze upon us with delight at 15 
the entrance of Barnet, and seem, by their air of weari- 
ness, to be returning from labor — do you mean to say 
that they are washerwomen and charwomen ? Oh, my 
poor friend, you are quite mistaken. I assure you they 
stand in a far higher rank ; for this one night they feel 20 
themselves by birth-right to be daughters of England, 
and answer to no humbler title. 

Every joy, however, even rapturous joy — such is the 
sad law of earth — may carry with it grief, or fear of 
grief, to some. Three miles beyond Barnet, we see ap- 25 
proaching us another private carriage, nearly repeating 
the circumstances of the former case. Here, also, the 
glasses are all down — here, also, is an elderly lady 
seated; but the two daughters are missing; for the 
single young person sitting by the lady's side seems to 



78 THOMAS BE QUINCEY. 

be an attendant — so I judge from her dress, and her 
air of respectful reserve. The lady is in mourning, and 
her countenance expresses sorrow. At first she does not 
look up ; so that I believe she is not aware of our ap- 

5 proach, until she hears the measured beating of our 
horses' hoofs. Then she raises her eyes to settle them 
painfully on our triumphal equipage. Our decorations 
explain the case to her at once ; but she beholds them 
with apparent anxiety, or even with terror. Some time 

10 before this, I, finding it difficult to hit a flying mark, 
when embarrassed by the coachman's person and reins 
intervening, had given to the guard a Courier evening 
paper, containing the gazette, for the next carriage that 
might pass. 

15 Accordingly he tossed it in, so folded that the huge 
capitals, expressing some such legend as glorious 
victory, might catch the eyes at once. To see the 
paper, however, at all, interpreted as it was by our en- 
signs of triumph, explained everything ; and, if the 

20 guard were right in thinking the lady to have received 
it with a gesture of horror, it could not be doubtful that 
she had suffered some deep personal affliction in con- 
nection with this Spanish war. 

Here, now, was the case of one who, having formerly 

25 suffered, might, erroneously perhaps, be distressing her- 
self with anticipations of another similar suffering. 
That same night, and hardly three hours later, occurred 
the reverse case. A poor woman, who too probably 
would find herself in a day or two to have suffered the 
heaviest of afflictions by the battle, blindly allowed her- 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 79 

self to express an exultation so unmeasured in the news 
and its details, as gave to her the appearance which 
amongst Celtic Highlanders is called /e?/. This was at 
some little town where we changed horses an hour or 
two after midnight. Some fair or wake had kept the 5 
people up out of their beds, and had occasioned a partial 
illumination of the stalls and booths, presenting an 
unusual but very impressive effect. We saw many 
lights moving about as we drew near ; and perhaps the 
most striking scene on the whole route was our reception 10 
at this place. The flashing of torches and the beautiful 
radiance of blue lights (technically, Bengal lights) upon 
the heads of our horses ; the fine effect of such a showery 
and ghostly illumination falling upon our flowers and 
glittering laurels ; whilst all around ourselves, that 15 
formed a centre of light, the darkness gathered on the 
rear and flanks in massy blackness ; these optical 
splendors, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of 
the people, composed a picture at once scenical and 
affecting, theatrical and holy. As we stayed for three 20 
or four minutes, I alighted; and immediately from a 
dismantled stall in the street, where no doubt she had 
been presiding through the earlier part of the night, ad- 
vanced eagerly a middle-aged woman. The sight of 
my newspaper it was that had drawn her attention 25 
upon myself. The victory which we were carrying 
down to the provinces on this occasion, was the imper- 
fect one of Talavera — imperfect for its results, such 
was the virtual treachery of the Spanish general, Cuesta, 
but not imperfect in its ever-memorable heroism. I 



80 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

told her the main outline of the battle. The agitation 
of her enthusiasm had been so conspicuous when listen- 
ing, and when first applying for information, that I 
could not but ask her if she had not some relative in 

5 the Peninsular army. Oh, yes ; her only son was there. 
In what regiment ? He was a trooper in the 23d 
Dragoons. My heart sank within me as she made that 
answer. This sublime regiment, which an Englishman 
should never mention without raising his hat to their 

10 memory, had made the most memorable and effective 
charge recorded in military annals. They leaped their 
horses — over a trench where they could, into it, and 
with the result of death and mutilation, when they 
could not. What proportion cleared the trench is no- 

15 where stated. Those who did, closed up and went 
down upon the enemy with such divinity of fervor (I 
use the word divinity by design : the inspiration of God 
must have prompted this movement to those whom even 
then He was calling to His presence), that two results 

20 followed. As regarded the enemy, this 23d Dragoons, 
not, I believe, originally three hundred and fifty strong, 
paralyzed a French column six thousand strong, then 
ascended the hill, and fixed the gaze of the whole French 
army. As regarded themselves, the 23d were supposed 

25 at first to have been barely not annihilated ; but event- 
ually, I believe, about one in four survived. And this, 
then, was the regiment — a regiment already for some 
hours glorified and hallowed to the ear of all London, as 
lying stretched, by a large majority, upon one bloody 
aceldama — in which the young trooper served whose 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 81 

mother was now talking in a spirit of such joyous en- 
thusiasm. Did I tell her the truth ? Had I the heart 
to break up her dreams ? No. To-morrow, said I to 
myself — to-morrow, or the next daj^, will publish the 
worst. For one night more, wherefore should she not 5 
sleep in peace ? After to-morrow, the chances are too 
many that peace will forsake her pillow. This brief 
respite, then, let her owe to my gift and my forbearance. 
But if I told her not of the bloody price that had been 
paid, not, therefore, was I silent on the contributions 10 
from her son's regiment to that day's service and glory. 
I showed her not the funeral banners under which the 
noble regiment was sleeping. I lifted not the over- 
shadowing laurels from the bloody trench in which 
horse and rider lay mangled together. But I told her 15 
how these dear children of England, officers and pri- 
vates, had leaped their horses over all obstacles as gayly 
as hunters to the morning's chase. I told her how 
they rode their horses into the mists of death (saying 
to myself, but not saying to her), and laid down their 20 
young lives for thee, mother England ! as willingly 
— poured out their noble blood as cheerfully — as ever, 
after a long day's sport, when infants, they had rested 
their wearied heads upon their mother's knees, or had 
sunk to sleep in her arms. Strange it is, yet true, that 25 
she seemed to have no fears for her son's safety, even 
after this knowledge that the 23d Dragoons had been 
memorably engaged ; but so much was she enraptured 
by the knowledge that his regiment, and therefore 
that he, had rendered conspicuous service in the dread- 



82 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

ful conflict — a service which had actually made them, 
within the last twelve hours, the foremost topic of 
conversation in London — so absolutely was fear swal- 
lowed up in joy — that, in the mere simplicity of her 
5 fervent nature, the poor woman threw her arms round 
my neck, as she thought of her son, and gave to me 
the kiss which secretly was meant for him. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH, 83 



SECTION THE SECOND. 

THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH. 

The incident, so memorable in itself by its features of 
horror, and so scenical by its grouping for the eye, 
which furnished the text for this revery upon Sudden 
Death, occurred to myself in the dead of night, as a soli- 
tary spectator, when seated on the box of the Manchester 5 
and Glasgow mail in the second or third summer after 
Waterloo. I find it necessary to relate the circum- 
stances, because they are such as could not have occurred 
unless under a singular combination of accidents. In 
those days the oblique and lateral communications with 10 
many rural post-offices were so arranged, either through 
necessity, or through defect of system, as to make it 
requisite for the main north-western mail (i.e., the down 
mail), on reaching Manchester, to halt for a number of 
hours ; how many, I do not remember — six or seven, I 15 
think ; but the result was, that, in the ordinary course, 
the mail recommenced its journey northwards about 
midnight. Wearied with the long detention at a gloomy 
hotel, I walked out about eleven o'clock at night for the 
sake of fresh air ; meaning to fall in with the mail, and 20 
resume my seat at the post-office. The night, however, 
being yet dark, as the moon had scarcely risen, and the 



84 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

streets being at that hour empty, so as to offer no oppor- 
tunities for asking the road, I lost my way ; and did not 
reach the post-office until it was considerably past mid- 
night ; but, to my great relief (as it was important for 
5 me to be in Westmoreland by the morning), I saw in 
the huge saucer eyes of the mail, blazing through the 
gloom, an evidence that my chance was not yet lost. 
Past the time it was ; but, by some rare accident, the 
mail was not even yet ready to start. I ascended to my 

10 seat on the box, where my cloak was still lying as it had 
lain at the Bridgewater Arms. I had left it there in 
imitation of a nautical discoverer, who leaves a bit of 
bunting on the shore of his discovery, by way of warn- 
ing off the ground the whole human race, and notifying 

15 to the Christian and the heathen worlds, with his best 
compliments, that he has hoisted his pocket handker- 
chief once and forever upon that virgin soil ; thence- 
forward claiming the jus dominii to the top of the atmos- 
phere above it ; and also the right of driving shafts to 

20 the centre of the earth below it ; so that all people found 
after this warning, either aloft in upper chambers of the 
atmosphere, or groping in subterraneous shafts, or squat- 
ting audaciously on the surface of the soil, will be 
treated as trespassers — kicked, that is to say, or deeap- 

25 itated, as circumstances may suggest, by their very faith- 
ful servant, the owner of the said pocket handkerchief. 
In the present case, it is probable that my cloak might 
not have been respected, and the jus gentium might 
have been cruelly violated in my person — for, in the 
dark, people commit deeds of darkness, gas being a 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 85 

* 
great ally of morality. But it so happened that, on this 
night, there was no other outside passenger; and thus 
the crime, which else was but too probable, missed fire 
for want of a criminal. 

Having mounted the box, I took a small quantity of 5 
laudanum, having already travelled two hundred and 
fifty miles — viz., from a point seventy miles beyond 
London. In the taking of laudanum there was nothing 
extraordinary. But by accident it drew upon me the spe- 
cial attention of my assessor on the box, the coachman. ie 
And in that also there was nothing extraordinary. But 
by accident, and with great delight, it drew my own 
attention to the fact that this coachman was a monster 
in point of bulk, and that he had but one eye. In fact, 
he had been foretold by Virgil as — 15 

"Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens cui lumen ademptum. " 

He answered to the conditions in every one of the 
items : — (1) a monster he was ; (2) dreadful ; (3) shape- 
less ; (4) huge ; (5) who had lost an eye. But why should 
that delight me ? Had he been one of the Calendars in 
the " Arabian Nights," and had paid down his eye as tyie 20 
price of his criminal curiosity, what right had / to exult 
in his misfortune ? I did not exult ; I delighted in no 
man's punishment, though it were even merited. But 
these personal distinctions (Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) identified 
in an instant an old friend of mine, whom I had known 25 
in the south for some years as the most masterly of mail- 
coachmen. He was the man in all Europe that could (if 
any could) have driven six-in-hand full gallop over Al 



86 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

Sirat — that dreadful bridge of Mahomet, with no side 
battlements, and of extra room not enough for a razor's 
edge — leading right across the bottomless gulf. Under 
this eminent man, whom in Greek I cognominated 

5 Cyclops diphrelates (Cyclops the charioteer), I, and others 
known to me, studied the diphrelatic art. Excuse, reader, 
a word too elegant to be pedantic. As a pupil, though I 
paid extra fees, it is to be lamented that I did not stand 
high in his esteem. It showed his dogged honesty (though, 

10 observe, not his discernment), that he could not see my 
merits. Let us excuse his absurdity in this particular, 
by remembering his want of an eye. Doubtless that 
made him blind to my merits. In the art of conversation, 
however, he admitted that I had the whip-hand of him. 

15 On this present occasion, great joy was at our meeting. 
But what was Cyclops doing here ? Had the medical 
men recommended northern air, or how ? I collected, 
from such explanations as he volunteered, that he had 
an interest at stake in some suit-at-law now pending at 

20 Lancaster ; so that probably he had got himself trans- 
ferred to this station, for the purpose of connecting 
with his professional pursuits an instant readiness for 
the calls of his law-suit. 

Meantime, what are we stopping for ? Surely we have 

25 now waited long enough. Oh, this procrastinating mail, 
and this procrastinating post-office ! Can't they take a 
lesson upon that subject from me? Some people have 
called me procrastinating. Yet you are witness, reader, 
that I was here kept waiting for the post-office. Will 
the post-office lay its hand on its heart, in its moments 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 87 

of sobriety, and assert that ever it waited for me ? 
What are they about ? The guard tells me that there 
is a large extra accumulation of foreign mails this night, 
owing to irregularities caused by war, by wind, by 
weather, in the packet service, which as yet does not 5 
benefit at all by steam. Eor an extra hour, it seems, the 
post-office has been engaged in threshing out the pure 
wheaten correspondence of Glasgow, and winnowing it 
from the chaff of all baser intermediate towns. But at 
last all is finished. Sound your horn, guard. Man- 10 
Chester, good-by ; we've lost an hour by your criminal 
conduct at the post-office : which, however, though I do 
not mean to part with a serviceable ground of complaint, 
and one which really is such for the horses, to me se- 
cretly is an advantage, since it compels us to look sharply 15 
for this lost hour amongst the next eight or nine, and to 
recover it, if we can, at the rate of one mile extra per 
hour. Off we are at last, and at eleven miles an hour; 
and for the moment I detect no changes in the energy 
or in the skill of Cyclops. 20 

From Manchester to Kendal, which virtually (though 
not in law) is the capital of Westmoreland, there were 
at this time seven stages of eleven miles each. The 
first five of these, counting from Manchester, terminate 
in Lancaster, which is therefore fifty-five miles north of 25 
Manchester, and the same distance exactly from Liver- 
pool. The first three stages terminate in Preston 
(called, by way of distinction from other towns of that 
name, proud Preston), at which place it is that the sepa- 
rate roads from Liverpool and from Manchester to the 



88 THOMAS BE QUINCEY. 

north become confluent. Within these first three stages 
lay the foundation, the progress, and termination of our 
night's adventure. During the first stage, I found out 
that Cyclops was mortal : he was liable to the shocking 

5 affection of sleep — a thing which previously I had 
never suspected. If a man indulges in the vicious habit 
of sleeping, all the skill in aurigation of Apollo himself, 
with the horses of Aurora to execute his notions, avail 
him nothing. " Oh, Cyclops ! " I exclaimed, " thou art 

10 mortal. My friend, thou snorest." Through the first 
eleven miles, however, this infirmity — which I grieve 
to say that he shared with the whole Pagan Pantheon — 
betrayed itself only by brief snatches. On waking up, 
he made an apology for himself, which, instead of mend- 

15 ing matters, laid open a gloomy vista of coming disas- 
ters. The summer assizes, he reminded me, were now 
going on at Lancaster, in consequence of which, for three 
nights and three days, he had not lain down in a bed. 
During the day, he was waiting for his own summons as 

20 a witness on the trial in which he was interested ; or 
else, lest he should be missing at the critical moment, 
was drinking with the other witnesses, under the pas- 
toral surveillance of the attorneys. During the night, 
or that part of it which at sea would form the middle 

25 watch, he was driving. This explanation certainly ac- 
counted for his drowsiness, but in a way which made it 
much more alarming ; since now, after several days' re- 
sistance to this infirmity, at length he was steadily giv- 
ing way. Throughout the second stage he grew more 
and more drowsy. In the second mile of the third 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 89 

stage, he surrendered himself finally and without a 
struggle to his perilous temptation. All his past resist- 
ance had but deepened the weight of this final oppres- 
sion. Seven atmospheres of sleep rested upon him ; and 
to consummate the case, our worthy guard, after sing- 5 
ing " Love amongst the roses " for perhaps thirty times, 
without invitation, and without applause, had in re- 
venge moodily resigned himself to slumber — not so 
deep, doubtless, as the coachman's, but deep enough for 
mischief. And thus at last, about ten miles from Pres- 10 
ton, it came about that I found myself left in charge of 
His Majesty's London and Glasgow mail, then running 
at the least twelve miles an hour. 

On this occasion the usual silence and solitude pre- 
vailed along the road. Not a hoof nor a wheel was to 15 
be heard. And to strengthen this false luxurious confi- 
dence in the noiseless roads, it happened also that the 
night was one of peculiar solemnity and peace. For my 
own part, though slightly alive to the possibilities of 
peril, I had so far yielded to the influence of the mighty 20 
calm as to sink into a profound revery. The month 
was August, in the middle of which lay my own birth- 
day — a festival to every thoughtful man suggesting 
solemn and often sigh-born thoughts. The county was 
my own native county, upon which, in its southern sec- 25 
tion, more than upon any equal area known to man past 
or present, had descended the original curse of labor in 
its heaviest form, not mastering the bodies only of men 
as of slaves, or criminals in mines, but working through 
the fiery will. Upon no equal space of earth was, or 



90 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

ever had been, the same energy of human power put 
forth daily. At this particular season also of the assizes, 
that dreadful hurricane of flight and pursuit, as it might 
have seemed to a stranger, which swept to and from 
5 Lancaster all day long, hunting the county up and down, 
and regularly subsiding back into silence about sunset, 
could not fail (when united with this permanent distinc- 
tion of Lancashire as the very metropolis and citadel of 
labor) to point the thoughts pathetically upon that 

10 counter vision of rest, of saintly repose from strife and 
sorrow, towards which, as to their secret haven, the pro- 
founder aspirations of men's hearts are in solitude con- 
tinually travelling. Obliquely upon our left we were 
nearing the sea, which also must, under the present -cir- 

15 cumstauces, be repeating the general state of halcyon 
repose. The sea, the atmosphere, the light, bore each 
an orchestral part in this universal lull. Moonlight, and 
the first timid tremblings of the dawn, were by this 
time blending; and the blendings were brought into a 

20 still more exquisite state of unity by a slight silvery 
mist, motionless and dreamy, that covered the woods 
and fields, but with a veil of equable transparency. 
Except the feet of our own horses, which, running on a 
sandy margin of the road, made but little disturbance, 

25 there was no sound abroad. In the clouds, and on the 
earth, prevailed the same majestic peace ; and in spite 
of all that the villain of a schoolmaster has done for the 
ruin of our sublimer thoughts, which are the thoughts 
of our infancy, we still believe in no such nonsense as a 
limited atmosphere. Whatever we may swear with our 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 91 

false feigning lips, in our faithful hearts we still believe, 
and must forever believe, in fields of air traversing the 
total gulf between earth and the central heavens. Still, 
in the confidence of children that tread without fear 
every chamber in their father's house, and to whom no 5 
door is closed, we, in that Sabbatic vision which some- 
times is revealed for an hour upon nights like this, 
ascend with easy steps from the sorrow-stricken fields 
of earth, upwards to the sandals of God. 

Suddenly, from thoughts like these, I was awakened 10 
to a sullen sound, as of some motion on the distant 
road. It stole upon the air for a moment ; I listened in 
awe ; but then it died away. Once roused, however, I 
could not but observe with alarm the quickened motion 
of our horses. Ten years' experience had made my eye 15 
learned in the valuing of motion; and I saw that we 
were now running thirteen miles an hour. I pretend to 
no presence of mind. On the contrary, my fear is, that 
I am miserably and shamefully deficient in that quality 
as regards action. The palsy of doubt and distraction 20 
hangs like some guilty weight of dark unfathomed 
remembrances upon my energies, when the signal is fly- 
ing for action. But, on the other hand, this accursed 
gift I have, as regards thought, that in the first step 
towards the possibility of a misfortune, I see its total 25 
evolution ; in the radix of the series I see too certainly 
and too instantly its entire expansion; in the first sylla- 
ble of the dreadful sentence, I read already the last. It 
was not that I feared for ourselves. Us, our bulk and 
impetus charmed against peril in any collision. And I 



92 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

had ridden through too many hundreds of perils that 
were frightful to approach, that were matter of laughter 
to look back upon, the first face of which was horror — 
the parting face a jest, for any anxiety to rest upon our 

5 interests. The mail was not built, I felt assured, nor 
bespoke, that could betray me who trusted to its protec- 
tion. But any carriage that we could meet would be 
frail and light in comparison of ourselves. And I re- 
marked this ominous accident of our situation. We 

10 were on the wrong side of the road. But then, it may 
be said, the other party, if other there was, might also 
be on the wrong side ; and two wrongs might make a 
right. That was not likely. The same motive which 
had drawn lis to the right-hand side of the road — 

15 viz., the luxury of the soft beaten sand, as contrasted 
with the paved centre — would prove attractive to 
others. The two adverse carriages would therefore, to 
a certainty, be travelling on the same side; and from 
this side, as not being ours in law, the crossing over to 

20 the other would, of course, be looked for from us. Our 
lamps, still lighted, would give the impression of vigi- 
lance on our part. And every creature that met us, 
would rely upon us for quartering. All this, and if the 
separate links of the anticipation had been a thousand 

25 times more, I saw, not discursively, or by effort, or by 
succession, but by one flash of horrid simultaneous 
intuition. 

Under this steady though rapid anticipation of the 
evil which might be gathering ahead, ah ! what a sullen 
mystery of fear, what a sigh of woe, was that which 



10 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 93 

stole upon the air, as again, the far-off sound of a wheel 
was heard ! A whisper it was — a whisper from, perhaps, 
four miles off — secretly announcing a ruin that, being 
foreseen, was not the less inevitable; that, being 
known, was not, therefore, healed. What could be done 
— who was it that could do it — to check the storm-flight 
of these maniacal horses ? Could I not seize the reins 
from the grasp of the slumbering coachman? You, 
reader, think that it would have been in your power to 
do so. And I quarrel not with your estimate of your- 
self. But, from the way in which the coachman's hand 
was viced between his upper and lower thigh, this was 
impossible. Easy, was it ? See, then, that bronze eques- 
trian statue. The cruel rider has kept the bit in his 
horse's mouth for two centuries. Unbridle him, for a 15 
minute, if you please, and wash his mouth with water. 
Easy, was it ? Unhorse me, then, that imperial rider ; 
knock me those marble feet from those marble stirrups 
of Charlemagne. 

The sounds ahead strengthened, and were now too 20 
clearly the sounds of wheels. Who and what could it 
be ? Was it industry in a taxed cart ? Was it youth- 
ful gayety in a gig ? Was it sorrow that loitered, or joy 
that raced ? For as yet the snatches of sound were too 
intermitting, from distance, to decipher the character of 25 
the motion. Whoever were the travellers, something 
must be done to warn them. Upon the other party rests 
the active responsibility, but upon us — and, woe is me ; 
that us was reduced to my frail opium-shattered self — 
rests the responsibility of warning. Yet, how should 



94 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

this be accomplished ? Might I not sound the guard's 
horn ? Already, on the first thought, I was making my 
way over the roof to the guard's seat. But this, from 
the accident which I have mentioned, of the foreign 

5 mails being piled upon the roof, was a difficult and even 
dangerous attempt to one cramped by nearly three hun- 
dred miles of outside travelling. And, fortunately, 
before I had lost much time in the attempt, our frantic 
horses swept round an angle of the road, which opened 

10 upon us that final stage where the collision must be ac- 
complished, and the catastrophe sealed. All was appar- 
ently finished. The court was sitting; the case was 
heard ; the judge had finished ; and only the verdict was 
yet in arrear. 

15 Before us lay an avenue, straight as an arrow, six hun- 
dred yards, perhaps, in length; and the umbrageous 
trees, which rose in a regular line from either side, meet- 
ing high overhead, gave to it the character of a cathe- 
dral aisle. These trees lent a deeper solemnity to the 

20 early light ; but there was still light enough to perceive, 
at the further end of this Gothic aisle, a frail reedy gig, 
in which were seated a young man, and by his side, a 
young lady. Ah, young sir ! what are you about ? If 
it is requisite that you should whisper your communica- 

25 tions to this young lady — though really I see nobody, at 
an hour and on a road so solitary, likely to overhear you 
— is it therefore requisite that you should carry your 
lips forward to hers ? The little carriage is creeping on 
at one mile an hour ; and the parties within it being 
thus tenderly engaged, are naturally bending down their 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 95 

heads. Between them and eternity, to all human cal- 
culations, there is but a minute and a half. Oh heavens ! 
what is it that I shall do ? Speaking or acting, what 
help can I offer ? Strange it is, and to a mere auditor of 
the tale might seem laughable, that I should need a sug- 5 
gestion from the " Iliad " to prompt the sole resource 
that remained. Yet so it was. Suddenly I remembered 
the shout of Achilles and its effect. But could I pre- 
tend to shout like the son of Peleus, aided by Pallas ? 
No : but then I needed not the shout that should alarm 10 
all Asia militant ; such a shout would suffice as might 
carry terror into the hearts of two thoughtless young 
people, and one gig-horse. I shouted — and the young 
man heard me not. A second time I shouted — and now 
he heard me, for now he raised his head. 15 

Here, then, all had been done that, by me, could be 
done : more on my part was not possible. Mine had 
been the first step ; the second was for the young man ; 
the third was for God. If, said I, this stranger is a 
brave man, and if, indeed, he loves the young girl at his 20 
side — or, loving her not, if he feels the obligation, press- 
ing upon every man worthy to be called a man, of doing 
his utmost for a woman confided to his protection — he 
will, at least, make some effort to save her. If that fails, 
he will not perish the more, or by a death more cruel, 25 
for having made it ; and he will die as a brave man 
should, with his face to the danger, and with his arm 
about the woman that he sought in vain to save. But, if 
he makes no effort, shrinking, without a struggle, from 
his dut} r , he himself will not the less certainly perish 



96 THOMAS BE QUINCEY. 

for this baseness of poltroonery. He will die no less : 
and why not ? Wherefore should we grieve that there 
is one craven less in the world ? No ; let him perish, 
without a pitying thought of ours wasted upon him; 
5 and, in that case, all our grief will be reserved for the 
fate of the helpless girl who now, upon the least shadow 
of failure in him, must, by the fiercest of translations — 
must, without time for a prayer — must, within seventy 
seconds, stand before the judgment-seat of God. 

10 But craven he was not : sudden had been the call upon 
him., and sudden was his answer to the call. He saw, he 
heard, he comprehended, the ruin that was coming down : 
already its gloomy shadow darkened above him ; and al- 
ready he was measuring his strength to deal with it. 

15 Ah ! what a vulgar thing does courage seem, when we 
see nations buying it and selling it for a shilling a day : 
ah! what a sublime thing does courage seem, when some 
fearful summons on the great deeps of life carries a man, 
as if running before a hurricane, up to the giddy crest 

20 of some tumultuous crisis, from which lie two courses, 
and a voice says to him audibly, " One way lies hope ; 
take the other, and mourn forever ! " How grand a tri- 
umph, if, even then, amidst the raving of all around him, 
and the frenzy of the danger, the man is able to confront 

25 his situation — is able to retire for a moment into soli- 
tude with God, and to seek his counsel from Him ! 

For seven seconds, it might be, of his seventy, the 
stranger settled his countenance steadfastly upon us, as 
if to search and value every element in the conflict be- 
fore him. For five seconds more of his seventy he sat 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 97 

immovably, like one that mused on some great purpose. 
For five more, perhaps, he sat with eyes upraised, like 
one that prayed in sorrow, under some extremity of doubt, 
for light that should guide him to the better choice. Then 
suddenly he rose j stood upright ; and by a powerful 5 
strain upon the reins, raising his horse's fore-feet from 
the ground, he slewed him round on the pivot of his 
hind-legs, so as to plant the little equipage in a position 
nearly at right angles to ours. Thus far his condition 
was not improved ; except as a first step had been taken 10 
towards the possibility of the second. If no more were 
done, nothing was done ; for the little carriage still oc- 
cupied the very centre of our path, though in an altered 
direction. Yet even now it may not be too late : fifteen 
of the seventy seconds may still be unexhausted ; and 15 
one almighty bound may avail to clear the ground. 
Hurry, then, hurry! for the flying moments — they 
hurry. Oh, hurry, hurry, my brave young man ! for 
the cruel hoofs of our horses — they also hurry ! East 
are the flying moments, faster are the hoofs of our 20 
horses. But fear not for him, if human energy can suf- 
fice ; faithful was he that drove to his terrific duty ; 
faithful was the horse to his command. One blow, one 
impulse given with voice and hand, by the stranger, one 
rush from the horse, one bound as if in the act of rising 25 
to a fence, landed the docile creature's fore-feet upon the 
crown or arching centre of the road. The larger half of 
the little equipage had then cleared our overtowering 
shadow : that was evident even to my own agitated sight. 
But it mattered little that one wreck should float off in 



98 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

safety, if upon the wreck that perished were embarked 
the human freightage. The rear part of the carriage — 
was that certainly beyond the line of absolute ruin ? 
What power could answer the question ? Glance of 

5 eye, thought of man, wing of angel, which of these had 
speed enough to sweep between the question and the 
answer, and divide the one from the other ? Light does 
not tread upon the steps of light more indivisibly, than 
did our all-conquering arrival upon the escaping efforts 

10 of the gig. That must the young man have felt too 
plainly. His back was now turned to us ; not by sight 
could he any longer communicate with the peril ; but by 
the dreadful rattle of our harness, too truly had his ear 
been instructed — that all was finished as regarded any 

15 further effort of his. Already in resignation he had 
rested from his struggle ; and perhaps in his heart he 
was whispering, " Father, which art in heaven, do Thou 
finish above what I on earth have attempted." Faster 
than ever mill-race we ran past them in our inexorable 

20 flight. Oh, raving of hurricanes that must have sounded 
in their young ears at the moment of our transit ! Even 
in that moment the thunder of collision spoke aloud. 
Either with the swingle-bar, or with the haunch of our 
near leader, we had struck the off-wheel of the little gig, 

25 which stood rather obliquely, and not quite so far ad- 
vanced, as to be accurately parallel with the near-wheel. 
The blow, from the fury of our passage, resounded ter- 
rifically. I rose in horror, to gaze upon the ruins we 
might have caused. From my elevated station I looked 
down, and looked back upon the scene, which in a mo- 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 99 

merit told its own tale, and wrote all its records on my 
heart forever. 

Here was the map of the passion that now had fin- 
ished. The horse was planted immovably, with his fore- 
feet upon the paved crest of the central road. He of 5 
the whole party might be supposed untouched by the 
passion of death. The little cany carriage — partly, 
perhaps, from the violent torsion of the wheels in its 
recent movement, partly from the thundering blow we 
had given to it — as if it sympathized with human hor- 10 
ror, was all alive with tremblings and shiverings. The 
young man trembled not, nor shivered. He sat like a 
rock. But his was the steadiness of agitation frozen 
into rest by horror. As yet he dared not to look round ; 
for he knew that, if anything remained to do, by him it 15 
could no longer be done. And as yet he knew not for 
certain if their safety were accomplished. But the 
lady — 

But the lady — ! Oh, heavens ! will that spectacle 
ever depart from my dreams, as she rose and sank upon 20 
her seat, sank and rose, threw up her arms wildly to 
heaven, clutched at some visionary object in the air, 
fainting, praying, raving, despairing ? Figure to your- 
self, reader, the elements of the case ; suffer me to re- 
call before your mind the circumstances of that unpar- 25 
alleled situation. From the silence and deep peace of 
this saintly summer night — from the pathetic blending 
of this sweet moonlight, dawnlight, clreamlight — from 
the manly tenderness of this flattering, whispering, 
murmuring love — suddenly as from the woods and fields 



100 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 

— suddenly as from the chambers of the air opening in 
revelation — suddenly as from the ground yawning at 
her feet, leaped upon her, with the flashing of cataracts, 
Death the crowned phantom, with all the equipage of his 

5 terrors, and the tiger roar of his voice. 

The moments were numbered ; the strife was finished ; 
the vision was closed. In the twinkling of an eye, our 
flying horses had carried us to the termination of the 
umbrageous aisle ; at right angles we wheeled into our 

10 former direction ; the turn of the road carried the scene 
out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it into my 
dreams forever. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 101 



SECTION THE THIRD. 

DREAM-FUGUE. 
FOUNDED ON THE PRECEDING THEME OF SUDDEN DEATH. 

" Whence the 60und 
Of instruments, that made melodious chime, 
Was heard, of harp and organ ; and who moved 
Their stops and chords, was seen; his volant touch 
Instinct through all proportions, low and high, 
Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue." 

Par. Lost, B. XI. 

Tumultuosissimamente. 
Passion of sudden death. ! that once in youth I read 
and interpreted by the shadows of thy averted signs — 
rapture of panic taking the shape (which amongst tombs 
in churches I have seen) of woman bursting her sepul- 
chral bonds — of woman's Ionic form bending forward 5 
from the ruins of her grave with arching foot, with eyes 
upraised, with clasped adoring hands — waiting, watch- 
ing, trembling, praying for the trumpet's call to rise 
from dust forever ! Ah, vision too fearful of shudder- 
ing humanity on the brink of almighty abysses ! — vis- 10 
ion that didst start back, that didst reel away, like a 
shrivelling scroll from before the wrath of fire racing 
on the wings of the wind ! Epilepsy so brief of horror, 
wherefore is it that thou canst not die ? Passing so 
suddenly into darkness, wherefore is it that still thou 15 
sheddest thy sad funeral blights upon the gorgeous 



102 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 

mosaics of dreams ? Fragment of music too passionate, 
heard once, and heard no more, what aileth thee, that 
thy deep rolling chords come up at intervals through all 
the worlds of sleep, and after forty years have lost no 
5 element of horror ? 

I. 

Lo, it is summer — almighty summer ! The everlast- 
ing gates of life and summer are thrown open wide ; and 
on the ocean, tranquil and verdant as a savannah, the 
unknown lady from the dreadful vision and I myself are 

10 floating — she upon a fairy pinnace, and I upon an 
English three-decker. Both of us are wooing gales of 
festal happiness within the domain of our common 
country, within that ancient watery park, within that 
pathless chase of ocean, where England takes her pleas- 

15 ure as a huntress through winter and summer, from the 
rising to the setting sun. Ah, what a wilderness of 
floral beauty was hidden, or was suddenly revealed, upon 
the tropic islands through which the pinnace moved! 
And upon her deck what a bevy of human flowers — 

20 young women how lovely, young men how noble, that 
were dancing together, and slowly drifting towards us 
amidst music and incense, amidst blossoms from forest 
and gorgeous corymbi from vintages, amidst natural 
carolling, and the echoes of sweet girlish laughter. 

25 Slowly the pinnace nears us, gayly she hails us, and 
silently she disappears beneath the shadow of our 
mighty bows. But then, as at some signal from heaven, 
the music, and the carols, and the sweet echoing of girl- 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 103 

ish laughter — all are hushed. What evil has smitten 
the pinnace, meeting or overtaking her ? Did ruin to 
our friends couch within our own dreadful shadow ? 
Was our shadow the shadow of death ? I looked over 
the bow for an answer, and, behold ! the pinnace was 5 
dismantled; the revel and the revellers were found no 
more ; the glory of the vintage was dust ; and the for- 
ests with their beauty were left without a witness upon 
the seas. " But where," and I turned to our crew — 
" where are the lovely women that danced beneath the 10 
awning of flowers and clustering corymbi ? Whither 
have fled the noble young men that danced with them ? 
Answer there was none. But suddenly the man at the 
mast-head, whose countenance darkened with alarm, cried 
out, " Sail on the weather beam ! Down she comes upon 15 
us ; in seventy seconds she also will founder." 

II. 

I looked to the weather side, and the summer had de- 
parted. The sea was rocking, and shaken with gather- 
ing wrath. Upon its surface sat mighty mists, which 
grouped themselves into arches and long cathedral aisles. 20 
Down one of these, with the fiery pace of a quarrel 
from a cross-bow, ran a frigate right athwart our course. 
" Are they mad ? " some voice exclaimed from our deck. 
" Do they woo their ruin ? " But in a moment, as she 
was close upon us, some impulse of a heady current or 25 
local vortex gave a wheeling bias to her course, and off 
she forged without a shock. As she ran past us, high 
aloft amongst the shrouds stood the lady of the pinnace. 



104 THOMAS BE QUINCEY. 

The deeps opened ahead in malice to receive her, tower- 
ing surge of foam ran after her, the billows were fierce 
to catch her. But far away she was borne into desert 
spaces of the sea ; whilst still by sight I followed her, 
5 as she ran before the howling gale, chased by angry sea- 
birds and by maddening billows ; still I saw her, as at 
the moment when she ran past us, standing amongst 
the shrouds, with her white draperies streaming before 
the wind. There she stood, with hair dishevelled, one 

10 hand clutched amongst the tackling — rising, sinking, 
fluttering, trembling, praying — there for leagues I saw 
her as she stood, raising at intervals one hand to heaven, 
amidst the fiery crests of the pursuing waves and the 
raving of the storm ; until at last, upon a sound from 

15 afar of malicious laughter and mockery, all was hidden 
forever in driving showers ; and afterwards, but when 
I know not, nor how. 

III. 

Sweet funeral bells from some incalculable distance, 
wailing over the dead that die before the dawn, awakened 

20 me as I slept in a boat moored to some familiar shore. 
The morning twilight even then was breaking ; and, by 
the dusky revelations which it spread, I saw a girl, 
adorned with a garland of white roses about her head for 
some great festival, running along the solitary strand in 

25 extremity of haste. Her running was the running of 
panic ; and often she looked back as to some dreadful 
enemy in the rear. But when I leaped ashore, and fol- 
lowed on her steps to warn her of a peril in front, alas ! 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 105 

from me she fled as from another peril, and vainly I 
shouted to her of quicksands that lay ahead. Faster 
and faster she ran ; round a promontory of rocks she 
wheeled out of sight ; in an instant I also wheeled round 
it, but only to see the treacherous sands gathering above 5 
her head. Already her person was buried ; only the fair 
young head and the diadem of white roses around it were 
still visible to the pitying heavens ; and, last of all, was 
visible one white marble arm. I saw by the early twi- 
light this fair young head, as it was sinking down to 10 
darkness — saw this marble arm, as it rose above her 
head and her treacherous grave, tossing, faltering, ris- 
ing, clutching, at some false, deceiving hand stretched 
out from the clouds — saw this marble arm uttering her 
dying hope, and then uttering her dying despair. The 15 
head, the diadem, the arm — these all had sunk ; at last 
over these also the cruel quicksand had closed ; and no 
memorial of the fair young girl remained on earth, except 
my own solitary tears, and the funeral bells from the 
desert seas, that, rising again more softly, sang a requiem 20 
over the grave of the buried child, and over her blighted 
dawn. 

I sat, and wept in secret the tears that men have ever 
given to the memory of those that died before the dawn, 
and by the treachery of earth, our mother. But sud- 25 
denly the tears and funeral bells were hushed by a shout 
as of many nations, and by a roar as from some great 
king's artillery, advancing rapidly along the valleys, and 
heard afar by echoes from the mountains. " Hush ! " I 
said, as I bent my ear earthwards to listen — " hush ! — 



106 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

this either is the very anarchy of strife, or else " — and 
then I listened more profoundly, and whispered as I 

raised my head — "or else, oh, heavens ! it is victory that 
is final, victory that swallows np all strife." 

IV. 

5 Immediately, in trance, I was carried over land and 
sea to some distant kingdom, and placed upon a tri- 
umphal car, amongst companions crowned with laurel. 
The darkness of gathering midnight brooding over all 
the land, hid from us the mighty crowds that were weav- 

10 ing restlessly about ourselves as a centre : we heard 
them, but saw them not. Tidings had arrived within 
an hour, of a grandeur that measured itself against cen- 
turies : too full of pathos they were, too full of joy, to 
utter themselves by other language than by tears, by 

15 restless anthems, and Te Deums reverberated from the 
choirs and orchestras of earth. These tidings we that 
sat upon the laurelled car had it for our privilege to pub- 
lish amongst all nations. And already, by signs audible 
through the darkness, by snortings and tramplings, our 

20 angry horses, that knew no fear of fleshly weariness, 
upbraided us with delay. Wherefore was it that we de- 
layed ? We waited for a secret word, that should 
bear witness to the hope of nations, as now accomplished 
forever. At midnight the secret word arrived ; which 

25 word was — Waterloo and recovered Christendom ! The 
dreadful word shone by its own light ; before us it went ; 
high above our leaders' heads it rode, and spread a 
golden light over the paths which we traversed. Every 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 107 

city at the presence of the secret word threw open its 
gates. The rivers were conscious as we crossed. All 
the forests, as we ran along their margins, shivered in 
homage to the secret word. And the darkness compre- 
hended it. 5 

Two hours after midnight we approached a mighty 
Minster. Its gates, which rose to the clouds, were closed. 
Eut when the dreadful word, that rode before us, reached 
them with its golden light, silently they moved back 
upon their hinges ; and at a flying gallop our equipage 10 
entered the grand aisle of the cathedral. Headlong 
was our pace ; and at every altar, in the little chapels 
and oratories to the right hand and left of our course, 
the lamps, dying or sickening, kindled anew in sympa- 
thy with the secret word that was flying past. Forty 15 
leagues we might have run in the cathedral, and as yet 
no strength of morning light had reached us, when be- 
fore us we saw the aerial galleries of organ and choir. 
Every pinnacle of the fretwork, every station of advan- 
tage amongst the traceries, was crested by white-robed 20 
choristers, that sang deliverance : that wept no more 
tears, as once their fathers had wept; but at intervals 
that sang together to the generations, saying, — 

" Chant the deliverer's praise in every tongue," 

and receiving answers from afar, — 

" Such as once in heaven and earth were sung." 

And of their chanting was no end ; of our headlong pace 25 
was neither pause nor slackening. 



108 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 

Thus, as we ran like torents — thus, as we swept with 
bridal rapture over the Campo Santo of the cathedral 
graves — suddenly we became aware of a vast necropolis 
rising upon the far-off horizon — a city of sepulchres, 
5 built within the saintly cathedral for the warrior dead 
that rested from their feuds on earth. Of purple granite 
was the necropolis ; yet, in the first minute, it lay like 
a purple stain upon the horizon, so mighty was the dis- 
tance. In the second minute it trembled through many 

10 changes, growing into terraces and towers of wondrous 
altitude, so mighty was the space. In the third minute 
already, with our dreadful gallop, we were entering its 
suburbs. Vast sarcophagi rose on every side, having 
towers and turrets that, upon the limits of the central 

15 aisle, strode forward with haughty intrusion, that ran 
back with mighty shadows into answering recesses. Ev- 
ery sarcophagus showed many bas-reliefs — bas-reliefs of 
battles and of battle-fields ; battles from forgotten ages — 
battles from yesterday — battle-fields that, long since, na- 

20 ture had healed and reconciled to herself with the sweet 
oblivion of flowers — battle-fields that were yet angry and 
crimson with carnage. Where the terraces ran, there did 
we run ; where the towers curved, there did we curve. 
With the flight of swallows our horses swept round every 

25 angle. Like rivers in flood, wheeling round headlands — 
like hurricanes that ride into the secrets of forests — 
faster than ever light unwove the mazes of darkness, our 
flying equipage carried earthly passions, kindled warrior 
instincts, amongst the dust that lay around us — dust 
oftentimes of our noble fathers that had slept in God from 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 109 

Cr6cy to Trafalgar. And now had we reached the last 
sarcophagus, now were we abreast of the last bas-relief, 
already had we recovered the arrow-like flight of the 
illimitable central aisle, when coming up this aisle to 
meet us we beheld afar off a female child, that rode in a 5 
carriage as frail as flowers. The mists, that went before 
her, hid the fawns that drew her, but could not hide the 
shells and tropic flowers with which she played — but 
could not hide the lovely smiles by which she uttered 
her trust in the mighty cathedral, and in the cherubim 10 
that looked down upon her from the mighty shafts of 
its pillars. Face to face she was meeting us ; face to 
face she rode, as if danger there were none. " Oh, baby ! " 
I exclaimed, " shalt thou be the ransom for Waterloo ? 
Must we, that carry tidings of great joy to every people, 15 
be messengers of ruin to thee ! " In horror I rose at the 
thought ; but then also, in horror at the thought, rose 
one that was sculptured on a bas-relief — a dying trum- 
peter. Solemnly from the field of battle he rose to his 
feet ; and, unslinging his stony trumpet, carried it, in his 20 
dying anguish, to his stony lips — sounding once, and yet 
once again, proclamation that, in thy ears, baby ! 
spoke from the battlements of death. Immediately deep 
shadows fell between us and aboriginal silence. The 
choir had ceased to sing. The hoofs of our horses, the 25 
dreadful rattle of our harness, the groaning of our wheels, 
alarmed the graves no more. By horror the bas-relief 
had been unlocked into life. By horror we, that were 
so full of life, we men and our horses, with their fiery 
fore-legs rising in mid-air to their everlasting gallop, 



110 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

were frozen to a bas-relief. Then a third time the trum- 
pet sounded ; the seals were taken off all pulses ; life, 
and the frenzy of life, tore into their channels again ; 
again the choir burst forth in sunny grandeur, as from 

5 the muffling of storms and darkness ; again the thunder- 
ings of our horses carried temptation into the graves. 
One cry burst from our lips, as the clouds, drawing off 
from the aisle, showed it empty before us — " Whither 
has the infant fled ? — is the young child caught up to 

10 God ?" Lo ! afar off, in a vast recess, rose three mighty 
windows to the clouds ; and, on a level with their sum- 
mits, at height insuperable to man, rose an altar of 
purest alabaster. On its eastern face was trembling a 
crimson glory. A glory was it from the reddening dawn 

15 that now streamed through the windows ? Was it from 
the crimson robes of the martyrs painted on the win- 
dows ? Was it from the bloody bas-reliefs of earth ? 
There, suddenly, within that crimson radiance, rose the 
apparition of a woman's head, and then of a woman's 

20 figure. The child it was — grown up to woman's height. 
Clinging to the horns of the altar, voiceless she stood — 
sinking, rising, raving, despairing ; and behind the vol- 
ume of incense, that, night and day, streamed upwards 
from the altar, dimly was seen the fiery font, and the 

25 shadow of that dreadful being who should have baptized 
her with the baptism of death. But by her side was 
kneeling her better angel, that hid his face with wings ; 
that wept and pleaded for her; that prayed when she 
could not ; that fought with Heaven by tears for her de- 
liverance ; which also, as he raised his immortal counte- 



THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. Ill 

nance from his wings, I saw, by the glory in his eye, 
that from Heaven he had won at last. 

Then was completed the passion of the mighty fugue. 
The golden tubes of the organ, which as yet had but 
muttered at intervals — gleaming amongst clouds and 5 
surges of incense — threw up, as from fountains unfathom- 
able, columns of heart-shattering music. Choir and anti- 
choir were filling fast with unknown voices. Thou also, 
Dying Trumpeter ! — with thy love that was victorious, 
and thy anguish that was finishing — didst enter the tu- 10 
mult ; trumpet and echo — farewell love and farewell an- 
guish — rang through the dreadful sanctus. Oh, darkness 
of the grave ! that from the crimson altar and from the fiery 
font wert visited and searched by the effulgence in the an- 
gel's eye — were these indeed thy children ? Pomps of life, 15 
that, from the burials of centuries, rose again to the voice 
of perfect joy, did ye indeed mingle with the festivals of 
Death ? Lo ! as I looked back for seventy leagues through 
the mighty cathedral, I saw the quick and the dead that 
sang together to God, together that sang to the genera- 20 
tions of man. All the hosts of jubilation, like armies 
that ride in pursuit, moved with one step. Us, that, 
with laurelled heads, were passing from the cathedral, 
they overtook, and, as with a garment, they wrapped us 
round with thunders greater than our own. As brothers 25 
we moved together ; to the dawn that advanced — to the 
stars that fled ; rendering thanks to God in the high- 
est — that, having hid His face through one generation 
behind thick clouds of War, once again was ascending — 
from the Campo Santo of Waterloo was ascending — in 



112 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

the visions of Peace ; rendering thanks for thee, young 
girl ! whom, having overshadowed with His ineffable pas- 
sion of death, suddenly did God relent ; suffered thy 
angel to turn aside His arm ; and even in thee, sister un- 

5 known ! shown to me for a moment only to be hidden 
forever, found an occasion to glorify His goodness. A 
thousand times, amongst the phantoms of sleep, have I 
seen thee entering the gates of the golden-dawn — with 
the secret word riding before thee — with the armies of 

10 the grave behind thee ; seen thee, sinking, rising, raving, 
despairing ; a thousand times in the worlds of sleep 
have seen thee followed by God's angel through storms ; 
through desert seas ; through the darkness of quick- 
sands ; through dreams, and the dreadful revelations 

15 that are in dreams — only that at the last, with one sling 
of His victorious arm, He might snatch thee back from 
ruin, and might emblazon in thy deliverance the endless 
resurrections of His love ! 



LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW. 



Oftentimes at Oxford I saw Levana in my dreams. 
I knew her by her Roman symbols. Who is Levana ? 
Reader, that do not pretend to have leisure for very 
much scholarship, you will not be angry with me for 
telling you. Levana was the Roman goddess that per- 5 
formed for the new-born infant the earliest office of 
ennobling kindness, — typical, by its mode, of that 
grandeur which belongs to man everywhere, and of 
that benignity in powers invisible which even in Pagan 
worlds sometimes descends to sustain it. At the very 10 
moment of birth, just as the infant tasted for the first 
time the atmosphere of our troubled planet, it was laid 
on the ground. That might bear different interpreta- 
tions. But immediately, lest so grand a creature should 
grovel there for more than oue instant, either the pater- 15 
nal hand, as proxy for the goddess Levana, or some near 
kinsman, as proxy for the father, raised it upright, bade 
it look erect as the king of all this world, and presented 
its forehead to the stars, saying, perhaps, in his heart, 
" Behold what is greater than yourselves ! " This sym- 20 
bolic act represented the function of Levana. And that 

113 



114 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 

mysterious lady, who never revealed her face (except to 
me in dreams), but always acted by delegation, had her 
name from the Latin verb (as still it is the Italian verb) 
levare, to raise aloft. 

5 This is the explanation of Levana. And hence it has 
arisen that some people have understood by Levana the 
tutelary power that controls the education of the nursery. 
She, that would not suffer at his birth even a prefigura- 
tive or mimic degradation for her awful ward, far less 

10 could be supposed to suffer the real degradation attach- 
ing to the non-development of his powers. She, there- 
fore, watches over human education. Now, the word 
educo, with the penultimate short, was derived (by a 
process often exemplified in the crystallization of lan- 

15 guages) from the word educo, with the penultimate long. 
Whatsoever educes, or develops, educates. By the edu- 
cation of Levana, therefore, is meant, — not the poor 
machinery that moves by spelling-books and grammars, 
but by that mighty system' of central forces hidden in 

20 the deep bosom of human life, which by passion, by 
strife, by temptation, by the energies of resistance, 
works forever upon children, — resting not day or night, 
any more than the mighty wheel of day and night them- 
selves, whose moments, like restless spokes, are glim- 

25 mering forever as they revolve. 

If, then, these are the ministries by which Levana 
works, how profoundly must she reverence the agencies 
of grief ! But you, reader ! think, — that children gen- 
erally are not liable to grief such as mine. There are 
two senses in the word generally, — the sense of Euclid, 



LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW. 115 

where it means universally (or in the whole extent of 
the genus), and a foolish sense of this world, where it 
means usually. Now, I am far from saying that children 
universally are capable of grief like mine. But there 
are more than you ever heard of who die of grief in this 5 
island of ours. I will tell you a common case. The 
rules of Eton require that a boy on the foundation 
should be there twelve years : he is superannuated at 
eighteen, consequently he must come at six. Children 
torn away from mothers and sisters at that age not un- 10 
frequently die. I speak of what I know. The com- 
plaint is not entered by the registrar as grief; but that 
it is. Grief of that sort, and at that age, has killed 
more than ever have been counted among its martyrs. 

Therefore it is that Levana often communes with the 15 
powers that shake man's heart : therefore it is that she 
dotes upon grief. " These ladies," said I softly to my- 
self, on seeing the ministers with whom Levana was con- 
versing, " these are the Sorrows ; and they are three in 
number, as the Graces are three, who dress man's life 20 
with beauty : the Parcce are three, who weave the dark 
arras of man's life in their mysterious loom always with 
colors sad in part, sometimes angry with tragic crimson 
and black ; the Furies are three, who visit with retribu- 
tions called from the other side of the grave offences 25 
that walk upon this ; and at once even the Muses were 
but three, who fit the harp, the trumpet, or the lute, to 
the great burdens of man's impassioned creations. These 
are the Sorrows, all three of whom I know." The last 
words I say now ; but in Oxford I said, " one of whom I 



116 THOMAS BE QUINCEY. 

know, and the others too surely I shall know." For 
already, in my fervent youth, I saw (dimly relieved upon 
the dark background of my dreams) the imperfect linea- 
ments of the awful sisters. These sisters — by what 

5 names shall we call them ? 

If I say simply, " The Sorrows," there will be a chance 
of mistaking the term ; it might be understood of indi- 
vidual sorrow, — separate cases of sorrow, — whereas I 
want a term expressing the mighty abstractions that 

10 incarnate themselves in all individual sufferings of man's 
heart ; and I wish to have these abstractions presented 
as impersonations, that is, as clothed with human attri- 
butes of life, and with functions pointing to flesh. Let 
us call them, therefore, Our Ladies of Sorrow. I know 

15 them thoroughly, and have walked in all their kingdoms. 
Three sisters they are, of one mysterious household; 
and their paths are wide apart ; but of their dominion 
there is no end. Them I saw often conversing with 
Levana, and sometimes about myself. Do they talk, 

20 then ? Oh, no ! Mighty phantoms like these disdain the 
infirmities of language. They may utter voices through 
the organs of man when they dwell in human hearts, 
but amongst themselves is no voice nor sound ; eternal 
silence reigns in their kingdoms. They spoke not, as 

25 they talked with Levana ; they whispered not ; they sang 
not; though oftentimes methought they might have 
sung : for I upon earth had heard their mysteries often- 
times deciphered by harp and timbrel, by dulcimer and 
organ. Like God, whose servants they are, they utter 
their pleasure not by sounds that perish, or by words 



LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW. 117 

that go astray, but by signs in heaven, by changes on 
earth, by pulses in secret rivers, heraldries painted on 
darkness, and hieroglyphics written on the tablets of 
the brain. They wheeled in mazes ; i" spelled the steps. 
They telegraphed from afar ; / read the signals. They 5 
conspired together ; and on the mirrors of darkness my 
eye traced the plots. Theirs were the symbols ; mine 
are the words. 

What is it the sisters are ? What is it that they do ? 
Let me describe their form and their presence, if form 10 
it were that still fluctuated in its outline, or presence it 
were that forever advanced to the front or forever re- 
ceded amongst shades. 

The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachrymarum, 
Our Lady of Tears. She it is that night and day raves 15 
and moans, calling for vanished faces. She stood in 
Eama where a voice was heard of lamentation — Rachel 
weeping for her children, and refused to be comforted. 
She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the night when 
Herod's sword swept its nurseries of Innocents, and the 20 
little feet were stiffened forever, which, heard at times 
as they tottered along floors overhead, woke pulses of 
love in household hearts that were not unmarked in 
heaven. 

Her eyes are sweet and subtile, wild and sleepy, by 25 
turns ; oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentimes chal- 
lenging the heavens. She wears a diadem round her 
head. And I knew by childish memories that she could 
go abroad upon the winds when she heard that sobbing 
of litanies or the thundering of organs, and when she 



118 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

beheld the mustering of summer clouds. This sister, 
the elder, it is that carries keys more than papal at her 
girdle, which open every cottage and every palace. She, 
to my knowledge, sat all last summer by the bedside of 
5 the blind beggar, him that so often and so gladly I talked 
with, whose pious daughter, eight years old, with the 
sunny countenance, resisted the temptations of play and 
village mirth to travel all day long on dusty roads with 
her afflicted father. For this did God send her a great 

10 reward. In the spring-time of the year, and whilst yet 
her own spring was budding, he recalled her to himself. 
But her blind father mourns forever over her ; still he 
dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is locked 
within his own ; and still he wakens to a darkness that 

15 is now within a second and a deeper darkness. This 
Mater Lachrymarum also has been sitting all this winter 
of 1844-5 within the bedchamber of the Czar, bringing 
before his eyes a daughter (not less pious) that vanished 
to God not less suddenly, and left behind her a darkness 

20 not less profound. By the power of her keys it is that 
Our Lady of Tears glides a ghostly intruder into the 
chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless 
children, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile to Missis- 
sippi. And her, because she is the first-born of her 

25 house, and has the widest empire, let us honor with the 
title of " Madonna." 

The second sister is called Mater Suspiriorum, Our 
Lady of Sighs. She never scales the clouds, nor walks 
abroad upon the winds. She wears no diadem. And 
her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet 



LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW. 119 

nor subtile ; no man could read their story ; they would 
be found filled with perishing dreams, and with wrecks 
of forgotten delirium. But she raises not her eyes ; her 
head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, droops forever, 
forever fastens on the dust. She weeps not. She 5 
groans not. But she sighs inaudibly at intervals. Her 
sister Madonna is oftentimes stormy and frantic, raging 
in the highest against heaven, and demanding back her 
darlings. But Our Lady of Sighs never clamors, never 
defies, dreams not of rebellious aspirations. She is 10 
humble to abjectness. Hers is the meekness that 
belongs to the hopeless. Murmur she may, but it is in 
her sleep. Whisper she may, but it is to herself in the 
twilight. Mutter she does at times, but it is in solitary 
places that are desolate as she is desolate, in ruined 15 
cities, and when the sun has gone down to his rest. 
This sister is the visitor of the Pariah, of the Jew, of 
the bondsman to the oar in the Mediterranean galleys ; 
of the English criminal in Norfolk Island, blotted out 
from the books of remembrance in sweet far-off Eng- 20 
land ; of the baffled penitent reverting his eyes forever 
upon a solitary grave, which to him seems the altar 
overthrown of some past and bloody sacrifice, on which 
altar no obligations can now be availing, whether toward 
pardon that he might implore, or toward reparation that 25 
he might attempt. Every slave that at noonday looks 
up to the tropical sun with timid reproach, as he points 
with one hand to the earth, our general mother, but for 
him a step-mother, — as he points with the other hand to 
the Bible, our general teacher, but against him sealed 



120 THOMAS BE QUINCEY. 

and sequestered; every woman sitting in darkness, with- 
out love to shelter her head, or hope to illumine her sol- 
itude because the heaven-born instincts kindling in her 
nature germs of holy affections, which God implanted in 
5 her womanly bosom, having been stifled by social necessi- 
ties, now burn sullenly to waste, like sepulchral lamps 
amongst the ancients ; every nun defrauded of her unre- 
turning May-time by wicked kinsman, whom God will 
judge ; every captive in every dungeon ; all that are 

10 betrayed, and all that are rejected ; outcasts by tradi- 
tionary law, and children of hereditary disgrace, — all 
these walk with Our Lady of Sighs. She also carries a 
key ; but she needs it little, for her kingdom is chiefly 
amongst the tents of Shem, and the houseless vagrant 

15 of every clime. Yet in the very highest ranks of man 
she finds chapels of her own ; and even in glorious Eng- 
land there are some that, to the world, carry their heads 
as proudly as the reindeer, who yet secretly have re- 
ceived her mark upon their foreheads. 

20 But the third sister, who is also the youngest — 
Hush ! whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is 
not large, or else no flesh should live ; but within that 
kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that 
of Cybele, raises almost beyond the reach of sight. She 

25 droops not j and her eyes rising so high might be hidden 
by distance. But, being what they are, they cannot be 
hidden ; through the treble veil of crape which she 
wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not 
for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of 
night, for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from 



LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW. 121 

the very ground. She is the detier of God. She also is 
the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. 
Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the 
nation that she rules. For she can approach only those 
in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by cen- 5 
tral convulsions ; in whom the heart trembles and the 
brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without 
and tempest from within. Madonna moves with uncer- 
tain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our 
Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this 10 
youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bound- 
ing, and with a tiger's leaps. She carries no key ; for, 
though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors 
at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her 
name is Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness. 15 

These were the Semnai Theai, or Sublime Goddesses, 
these were the Eumenides, or Gracious Ladies (so called 
by antiquity in shuddering propitiation), of my Oxford 
dreams. Madonna spoke. She spoke by her mysterious 
hand. Touching my head, she beckoned to Our Lady of 20 
Sighs ; and what she spoke, translated out of the signs 
which (except in dreams) no man reads, was this : — 

" Lo ! here is he whom in childhood I dedicated to my 
altars. This is he that once I made my darling. Him 
I led astray, him I beguiled, and from heaven I stole 25 
away his young heart to mine. Through me did he 
become idolatrous ; and through me it was, by languish- 
ing desires, that he worshipped the worm and prayed to 
the wormy grave. Holy was the grave to him ; lovely 
was its darkness ; saintly its corruption. Him, this 



122 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 

young idolater, I have seasoned for thee, dear, gentle 
Sister of Sighs ! Do thou take him now to thy heart. 

and season him for our dreadful sister. And thou." 

turning to '. -arum, she said, "wicked 

iter, that temptest and hatest, do thou take him from 

her. See that thy sceptre lie heavy on his head. Suffer 
not woman and her tenderness to sit near him in his 
darkness. Banish the frailties of hope, wither the re- 
lenting of love, scorch the fountains o^ tears, eurse him 

10 as only thou canst eurse. So shall he he accomplished in 
the furnaee, so shall he see the things that ought not to 
be seen, sights that are abominable, and seerets that are 
unutterable. So shall he read elder truths, sad truths, 
grand truths, fearful truths. So shall he rise again 

15 before he dies. And so shall our commission be accom- 
plished which from God we had — to plague his heart 
until we had unfolded the eapaeities of his spirit.' 1 



DINNER, REAL AND REPUTED. 



Great misconceptions have always prevailed about the 
Roman dinner. Dinner [coma] was the only meal which 
the Romans as a nation took. It was no accident, but 
arose out of their whole social economy. This I shall 
endeavor to show by running through the history of a 5 
Roman day. Iiidentem dicere. verum quid vetat? And 
the course of this review will expose one or two impor- 
tant truths in ancient political economy, which have 
been too much overlooked. 

With the lark it was that the Roman rose. Not that 10 
the earliest lark rises so early in Latium as the earliest 
lark in England ; that is, during summer ; but then, on 
the other hand, neither does it ever rise so late. The 
Roman citizen was stirring with the dawn — which, 
allowing for the shorter longest day and longer short- 15 
est day of Rome, you may call about four in summer — 
about seven in winter. Why did he do this ? Because 
he went to bed at a very early hour. But why did he 
do that ? By backing in this way, we shall surely back 
into the very well of truth ; always, where it is possible, 20 
let us have the pourquoi of the pourquoi. The Roman 
went to bed early for two remarkable reasons. First, 

123 



124 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 

Because in Rome, built for a martial destiny, every 
habit of life bad reference to the usages of war. Every 
citizen, if he were not a mere proletarian animal kept at 
the public cost, with a view to his proles, or offspring, 

5 held himself a soldier elect ; the more noble he was, the 
more was his liability to military service ; in short, all 
Some, and at all times, was consciously " in procinct." 
Now, it was a principle of ancient warfare, that every 
hour of daylight had a triple worth, as valued against 

10 hours of darkness. That was one reason — a reason sug- 
gested by the understanding. But there was a second 
reason, far more remarkable ; and this was a reason sug- 
gested by a blind necessity. It is an important fact, 
that this planet on which we live, this little industrious 

15 earth of ours, has developed her wealth by slow stages 
of increase. She was far from being the rich little 
globe in Caesar's days that she is at present. The earth 
in our days is incalculably richer, as a whole, than in the 
time of Charlemagne ; and at that time she was richer, 

20 by many a million of acres, than in the era of Augustus. 
In that Augustan era we descry a clear belt of cultiva- 
tion, averaging perhaps six hundred miles in depth, 
running in a ring-fence about the Mediterranean. This 
belt, and no more, was in decent cultivation. Beyond 

25 that belt there was only a wild Indian cultivation ; 
generally not so much. At present what a difference ! 
We have that very belt, but much richer, all things 
considered, cequatis cequandis, than in the Roman era, 
and much beside. The reader must not look to single 
cases, as that of Egypt and other parts of Africa, but 



DINNER, REAL AND REPUTED. 125 

take the whole collectively. On that scheme of valua- 
tion, we have the old Roman belt, the circum-Mediter- 
ranean girdle not much tarnished, and we have all the 
rest of Europe to boot. Such being the case, the earth, 
being (as a whole) in that Pagan era so incomparably 5 
poorer, could not in the Pagan era support the expense 
of. maintaining great empires in cold latitudes. Her 
purse would not reach that cost. Wherever she under- 
took in those early ages to rear man in great abundance, 
it must be where nature would consent to work in 10 
partnership with herself ; where warmth was to be had 
for nothing ; where clothes were not so entirely indis- 
pensable but that a ragged fellow might still keep him- 
self warm ; where slight shelter might serve ; and where 
the soil, if not absolutely richer in reversionary wealth, 15 
was more easily cultured. Nature, in those days of 
infancy, must come forward liberally, and take a number 
of shares in every new joint-stock concern before it 
could move. Man, therefore, went to bed early in those 
ages, simply because his worthy mother earth could not 20 
afford him candles. She, good old lady (or good young 
lady, for geologists know not whether she is in that 
stage of her progress which corresponds to gray hairs, 
or to infancy, or to " a certain age ") — she, good lady, 
would certainly have shuddered to hear any of her 25 
nations asking for candles. " Candles, indeed ! " she 
would have said ; " who ever heard of such a thing ? and 
with so much excellent daylight running to waste, as I 
have provided gratis/ What will the wretches want 
next ? " 



126 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

The daylight, furnished gratis, was certainly "unde- 
niable " in its quality, and quite sufficient for all pur- 
poses that were honest. Seneca, even in his own 
luxurious period, called those men lucifugcu, and by 

5 other ugly names, who lived chiefly by candle-light. 
None but rich and luxurious men, nay, even amongst 
these, none but idlers, did or could live by candle-light. 
An immense majority of men in Rome never lighted a 
candle, unless sometimes in the early dawn. And this 

10 custom of Rome was the custom also of all nations that 
lived round the great lake of the Mediterranean. In 
Athens, Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor, everywhere, the 
ancients went to bed, like good boys, from seven to nine 
o'clock. The Turks and other people, who have suc- 

15 ceeded to the stations and the habits of the ancients, do 
so at this day. 

The Roman, therefore, who saw no joke in sitting 
round a table in the dark, went off to bed as the dark- 
ness began. Everybody did so. Old Numa Pompilius 

20 himself was obliged to trundle off in the dusk. Tar- 
quinius might be a very superb fellow ; but I doubt 
whether he ever saw a farthing rushlight. And, though 
it may be thought that plots and conspiracies would 
flourish in such a city of darkness, it is to be consid- 

25 ered that the conspirators themselves had no more 
candles than honest men : both parties were in the 
dark. 

Being up, then, and stirring not long after the lark, 
what mischief did the Roman go about first ? Nowa- 
days, he would have taken a pipe or a cigar. But, alas 



DINNER, REAL AND REPUTED. 127 

for the ignorance of the poor heathen creatures ! they 
had neither the one nor the other. In this point, I must 
tax our mother earth with being really too stingy. In 
the use of candles I approve of her parsimony. Much 
mischief is brewed by candle-light. But it was coming 5 
it too strong to allow no tobacco. 

So, after shaving (supposing the age of the Barbati to 
be passed), what is the first business that our Roman will 
undertake ? Forty to one he is a poor man, born to look 
upwards to his fellow-men, and not to look down upon 10 
anybody but slaves. He goes, therefore, to the palace 
of some grandee, some top-sawyer of the senatorian 
order. This great man, for all his greatness, has turned 
out even sooner than himself. For he also has had no 
candles and no cigars ; and as he well knows that, before 15 
the sun looks into his portals, all his halls will be over- 
flowing and buzzing with the matin susurrus of courtiers 
— the mane salutantes. 

It is as much as his popularity is worth to absent 
himself, or to keep people waiting. But, surely, the 20 
reader may think, this poor man he might keep wait- 
ing. No, he might not ; for, though poor, being a citi- 
zen, the man is a gentleman. That was the conse- 
quence of keeping slaves. Wherever there is a class 
of slaves, he that enjoys the jus suffragii (no matter 25 
how poor) is a gentleman. The true Latin word for 
a gentleman is ingenuus, — a freeman and the son of 
a freeman. 

Having paid his court, you will suppose that our 
friend comes home to breakfast. Not at all ; no such 



128 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

discovery as " breakfast " had then been made : break- 
fast was not invented for many centuries after that. 
Breakfast was not suspected. No prophecy, no type of 
breakfast, had been published. In fact, it took as much 

5 time and research to arrive at that great discovery as at 
the Copernican system. True it is, reader, that you 
have heard of such a word as jentaculum ; and your 
dictionary translates that old heathen word by the 
Christian word breakfast. But dictionaries are dull 

10 deceivers. Between jentaculum and breakfast the dif- 
ferences are as wide as between a horse-chestnut and a 
chestnut horse ; differences in the time when, in the 
place where, in the manner how, but pre-eminently in 
the thing which. 

15 Galen is a good authority upon such a subject, since, 
if (like other Pagans) he ate no breakfast himself, in 
some sense he may be called the cause of breakfast to 
other men, by treating of those things which could safely 
be taken upon an empty stomach. As to the time, he 

20 (like many other authors) says, about the third, or at 
farthest, about the fourth hour ; and so exact is he, that 
he assumes the day to lie exactly between six and six 
o'clock, and to be divided into thirteen equal portions. 
So the time will be a few minutes before nine, or a few 

25 minutes before ten, in the forenoon. That seems fair 
enough. But it is not time with respect to its location 
that we are concerned with, so much as time in respect 
to its duration. Now, heaps of authorities take it for 
granted that you are not to sit down — you are to stand; 
and, as to the place, that any place will do — "any cor- 



DINNER, REAL AND REPUTED. 129 

ner of the forum," says Galen, "any corner that you 
fancy ; " which is like referring a man for his salle a 
manger to Westminster Hall or Fleet Street. Augustus, 
in a letter still surviving, tells us that he jentabat, or 
took his jentaculum, in his carriage ; sometimes in a 5 
wheeled carriage {inessedo), sometimes in a litter or 
palanquin (in lectica). This careless and disorderly way 
as to time, and place, and other circumstances of haste, 
sufficiently indicate the quality of the meal you are to 
expect. Already you are " sagacious of your quarry 10 
from so far." Not that we would presume, excellent 
reader, to liken you to Death, or to insinuate that you 
are a " grim feature." But would it not make a saint 
" grim " to hear of such preparations for the morning 
meal ? And then to hear of such consummations as 15 
pants siccus, dry bread ; or (if the learned reader thinks 
it will taste better in Greek), ixqtoc, Sygog ! And what may 
this word dry happen to mean ? " Does it mean stale ? " 
says Salmasius. " Shall we suppose," says he, in queru- 
lous words, " molli et recenti opponi" that it is placed in 20 
antithesis to soft and new bread, what English sailors 
call " soft tommy " ? and from antithesis conclude it to 
to be " durum et non recens coctum eoque sicciorem " ? 
Hard and stale, and in that proportion more arid ? Not 
quite so bad as that, we hope. Or again, — " siccum pro 25 
biscocto, ut hodie vocatnus, sumemus " ? By hodie Salma- 
sius means, amongst his countrymen of France, where 
biscoctus is verbatim reproduced in the word bis (twiee), 
cuit (baked) ; whence our own biscuit. Biscuit might do 
very well, could we be sure that it was cabin biscuit ; 



130 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

but Salmasius argues that — in this case he takes it to 
mean " brecellatum, qui est panis nauticus," that is, the 
ship company's biscuit, broken with a sledge-hammer. 
In Greek, for the benefit again of the learned reader, it 

5 is termed dm/ugog, indicating that it has passed twice 
under the action of fire. 

" Well," you say, " no matter if it had passed through 
the fires of Moloch ; only let us have this biscuit, such 
as it is." In good faith, then, fasting reader, you are 

10 not likely to see much more than you have seen. It is a 
very Barmecide feast, we do assure you, this same "jen- 
taculum ;" at which abstinence and patience are much 
more exercised than the teeth ; faith and hope are the 
chief graces cultivated, together with that species of the 

15 magnificum which is founded on the ignotum. But even 
this biscuit was allowed in the most limited quantities. 
Speaking of his uncle, Pliny the Younger says, Post 
solem plerumque lavabatur : deinde gustabat ; dormiebat 
minimum : mox, quasi alio die, studebat in coenae tem- 

20 pus. " After taking the air, generally speaking, he 
bathed : after that he broke his fast on a morsel of bis- 
cuit, and took a very slight siesta : which done, as if 
awaking to a new day, he set in regularly to his studies, 
and pursued them to dinner time." Gustabat here means 

25 that nondescript meal which arose at Rome when jenta- 
culum and prandium were fused into one, and that only 
a taste or mouthful of biscuit, as we shall show further 
on. 

Possibly, however, most excellent reader, like some 
epicurean traveller, who, in crossing the Alps, finds him- 



DINNER, REAL AND REPUTED. 131 

self weather-bound at St. Bernard's on Ash- Wednesday, 
you surmise a remedy: you descry some opening from "the 
loop-holes of retreat," through which a few delicacies 
might be insinuated to spread verdure on this arid 
wilderness of biscuit. But sorry I am to say that, in 5 
this case, no relief is hinted at in any ancient author. 
A grape or two (not a bunch of grapes), a raisin or two, 
a date, an olive, — these are the whole amount of relief 
which the chancery of the Roman kitchen granted in 
such cases. All things here hang together, and prove 10 
each other, — the time, the place, the mode, the thing. 
Well might a man eat standing, or eat in public, such a 
trifle as this. Go home, indeed, to such a breakfast ? 
You vsould as soon think of ordering a cloth to be laid in 
order to eat a peach, or of asking a friend to join you in 15 
an orange. No man in his senses makes "two bites of 
a cherry." So let us pass to the other stages of the day. 
Only, in taking leave of this morning stage, throw your 
e} T es back with me, Christian reader, upon this truly 
heathen meal, fit for idolatrous dogs like your Greeks 20 
and Romans ; survey, through the vista of ages, that 
thrice accursed biscuit, with half a fig, perhaps, by way 
of garnish, and a huge hammer by its side, to secure the 
certainty of mastication by previous comminution. Then 
turn your eyes to a Christian breakfast — hot rolls, eggs, 25 
coffee, beef : but down, down, rebellious visions : we need 
say no more ! You, reader, like myself, will breathe a 
malediction on the Classical era, and thank your stars 
for making you a Romanticist. Every morning I thank 
mine for keeping me back from the Augustan age, and 



132 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

reserving me to a period in which breakfast had been 
already invented. In the words of Ovid, I say : — 

" Prisca juvent alios: ego me nunc denique natum 
Gratulor. Haec aetas moribus apta meis." 

Our friend, the Roman cit, has therefore thus far, in 
his progress through life, obtained no breakfast, if he 
5 ever contemplated an idea so frantic. But it occurs to 
you, my faithful reader, that perhaps he will not always 
be thus unhappy. I could bring wagon loads of senti- 
ments, Greek as well as Roman, which prove, more 
clearly than the most eminent pikestaff, that, as the 
10 wheel of fortune revolves, simply out of the fact that it 
has carried a man downwards, it must subsequently 
carry him upwards, no matter what dislike that wheel, 
or any of its spokes, may bear to that man : non si male 
nunc sit, et olim sic erlt : and that if a man, through 
15 the madness of his nation, misses coffee and hot rolls 
at nine, he may easily run into a leg of mutton at twelve. 
True it is he may do so : truth is commendable ; and I 
will not deny that a man may sometimes, by losing a 
breakfast, gain a dinner. Such things have been in vari- 
20 ous ages, and will be again, but not at Rome. There were 
reasons against it. We have heard of men who consider 
life under the idea of a wilderness, dry as a " remainder 
biscuit after a voyage : " and who consider a day under the 
idea of a little life. Life is the macrocosm, or world at 
25 large ; day is the microcosm, or world in miniature. 
Consequently, if life is a wilderness, then day, as a little 
life, is a little wilderness. And this wilderness can be 



DINNER, REAL AND REPUTED. 133 

safely traversed only by leaving relays of fountains, or 
stages for refreshment. Such stages, they conceive, are 
found in the several meals which Providence has stationed 
at due intervals through the day, whenever the perverse- 
ness of man does not break the chain or derange the 5 
order of succession. 

These are the anchors by which man rides in that bil- 
lowy ocean between morning and night. The first an- 
chor, viz., breakfast, having given way in Rome, the 
more need there is that he should pull up by the sec- 10 
ond : and that is often reputed to be dinner. And as 
your dictionary, good reader, translated breakfast by 
that vain word jentaculum, so doubtless it will translate 
dinner by that still vainer word prandium. Sincerely I 
hope that your own dinner on this day, and through all 15 
time coming, may have a better root in fact and sub- 
stance than this most visionary of baseless things — the 
Roman prandium, of which I shall presently show you 
that the most approved translation is moonshine. 

Eeader, I am anything but jesting here. In the very 20 
spirit of serious truth, I assure you that the delusion 
about jentaculum is even exceeded by this other delu- 
sion about prandium. Salmasius himself, for whom a 
natural prejudice of place and time partially obscured 
the truth, admits, however, that prandium was a meal 25 
which the ancients rarely took ; his very words are — 
raro prandebant veteres. Now, judge for yourself of 
the good sense which is shown in translating by the 
word dinner, which must of necessity mean the chief 
meal, a Roman word which represents a fancy meal, a 



134 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

meal of caprice, a meal which few people took. At this 
moment, what is the single point of agreement between 
the noon meal of the English laborer and the evening 
meal of the English gentleman ? what is the single cir- 
5 cumstance common to both, which causes us to denomi- 
nate them by the common name of dinner ? It is, that 
in both we recognize the principal meal of the day, the 
meal on which is thrown the onus of the day's support. 
In everything else they are as wide asunder as the 

10 poles ; but they agree in this one point of their func- 
tion. Is it credible now, that, to represent such a meal 
amongst ourselves, we select a Roman word so notori- 
ously expressing a mere shadow, a pure apology, that 
very few people ever tasted it — nobody sat down to it 

15 — not many washed their hands after it, and gradually 
the very name of it became interchangeable with an- 
other name, implying the slightest possible act of tenta- 
tive tasting ? Says Seneca, " After bathing I take a 
prandium without sitting down to table, and such &pran- 

20 dium as brings after itself no need of washing the 
hands." No ; moonshine as little soils the hands as it 
oppresses the stomach. 

Thus I have brought down our Roman friend to noon- 
day, or even one hour later than noon, and to this mo- 

25 ment the poor man has had nothing to eat. For 
supposing him to be not impransus, and supposing him 
jentdsse beside : yet it is evident (I hope) that neither 
one nor the other means more than it was often called — 
viz., fiovxxio/uog, or, in plain English, a mouthful. How 
long do we intend to keep him waiting? Reader, he 



DINNER, REAL AND REPUTED. 135 

will dine at three, or (supposing dinner put off to the 
latest) at four. Dinner was never known to be later 
than the tenth hour at Rome, which in summer would 
be past five ; but in a far greater proportion of days 
would be near four in Rome. And so entirely was a 5 
Roman the creature of ceremonial usage, that a national 
mourning would probably have been celebrated, and the 
" sad augurs " would have been called in to expiate the 
prodigy, had the general dinner lingered beyond four. 

But, meantime, what has our friend been about since 10 
perhaps six or seven in the morning ? After paying his 
little homage to his patronus, in what way has he fought 
with the great enemy Time since then ? Why, reader, 
this illustrates one of the most interesting features in 
the Roman character. The Roman was the idlest of 15 
men. " Man and boy, he was an idler in the land." He 
called himself and his pals, rerum dominos, gentemque 
togatum — " the gentry that wore the toga." Yes, a 
pretty set of gentry they were, and a pretty affair that 
" toga " was. Just figure to yourself, reader, the picture 20 
of a hard working man, with horny hands, like our 
hedgers, ditchers, porters, etc., setting to work on the 
high road in that vast sweeping toga, filling with a 
strong gale like the mainsail of a frigate. Conceive the 
roars with which this "magnificent figure would be 25 
received into the bosom of a modern poor-house detach- 
ment sent out to attack the stones on some line of road, 
or a fatigue party of dustmen sent upon secret service. 
Had there been nothing left as a memorial of the Ro- 
mans but that one relic — their immeasurable toga — I 



136 THOMAS BE QUINCEY. 

should have known that they were born and bred to 
idleness. In fact, except in war, the Eoman never did 
anything at all but sun himself. TJti se apricaret was 
the final cause of peace in his opinion ; in literal truth, 
5 that he might make an apricot of himself. The public 
rations at all times supported the poorest inhabitant of 
Rome if he were a citizen. Hence it was that Hadrian 
was so astonished with the spectacle of Alexandria, 
"civitas opulenta, faecnnda, in qua nemo vivat otiosus." 

10 Here first he saw the spectacle of a vast city, second only 
to Rome, where every man had something to do. No 
poor rates levied upon the rest of the world for the ben- 
efit of their own paupers were there distributed gratis. 
The prodigious spectacle (such it seemed to Hadrian) 

15 was exhibited in Alexandria, of all men earning their 
bread in the sweat of their brow. In Rome only (and in 
one time in some of the Grecian states), it was the very 
meaning of citizen that he should vote and be idle. Pre- 
cisely those were the two things which the Roman, the 

zofaex Romuli, had to do — viz., sometimes to vote, and 
always to be idle. 

In these circumstances, where the whole sum of life's 
duties amounted to voting, all the business man could 
have was to attend the public assemblies, electioneering 

25 or factions. These, and any judicial trial (public or pri- 
vate) that might happen to interest him for the persons 
concerned, or for the questions at stake, amused him 
through the morning ; that is, from eight till one. He 
might also extract some diversion from the columnae, or 
pillars of certain porticoes to which they pasted adver- 



DINNER, REAL AND REPUTED. 137 

tisements. These affiches must have been numerous ; 
for all the girls in Rome who lost a trinket, or a pet bird, 
or a lap-dog, took this mode of angling in the great ocean 
of the public for the missing articles. 

But all this time I take for granted that there were no 5 
shows in a course of exhibition, either the dreadful ones 
of the amphitheatre, or the bloodless ones of the circus. 
If there were, then that became the business of all Bo- 
mans ; and it was a business which would have occupied 
him from daylight till the light began to fail. Here we 10 
see another effect from the scarcity of artificial light 
among the ancients. These magnificent shows went on 
by daylight. However, as there may happen to be no 
public spectacles, and the courts of political meetings 
(if not closed altogether by superstition) would at any 15 
rate be closed in the ordinary course by twelve or one 
o'clock, nothing remains for him to do, before returning 
home, except, perhaps, to attend the palaestra, or some 
public recitation of a poem written by a friend, but in 
any case to attend the public baths. For these the time 20 
varied ; and many people have thought it tyrannical in 
some of the Caesars that they imposed restraints on the 
time open for the baths ; some, for instance, would not 
suffer them to open at all before two ; and in any case, 
if you were later than four or five in the summer, you 25 
would have to pay a fine, which most effectually cleaned 
out the baths of all raff, since it was a sum that John 
Quires could not have produced to save his life. 

And now, at last, bathing finished, and the exercises 
of the palaestra, at half-past two or three, our friend 



138 THOMAS BE QUINCEY. 

finds his way home, not again to leave it for that day. 
He is now a new man, refreshed, oiled with perfumes, 
his dust washed off by hot water, and ready for enjoy- 
ment. These were the things that determined the time 

5 for dinner. Had there been no other proof that coena 
was the Roman dinner, this is an ample one. Now first 
the Roman was fit for dinner, in a condition of luxuri- 
ous ease ; business over — that day's load of anxiety laid 
aside — his cuticle, as he delighted to talk, cleansed and 

10 polished — nothing more to do or to think of till next 
morning : he might go and dine, and get drunk with a 
safe conscience. Besides, if he does not get dinner 
now, when will he get it ? For most demonstrably he 
has taken nothing yet which comes near in value to that 

15 basin of soup which many of ourselves take at the 
Roman hour of bathing. No ; we have kept our man 
fasting as yet. It is to be hoped that something is 
coming at last. 

Yes, something is coming ; dinner is coming, the 

20 great meal of " coena ; " the meal sacred to hospitality 
and genial pleasure comes now to fill up the rest of the 
day, until light fails altogether. 

Many people are of opinion that the Romans only 
understood what the capabilities of dinner were. It is 

25 certain that they were the first great people that discov- 
ered the true secret and meaning of dinner, the great 
office which it fulfils, and which we in England are now 
so generally acting on. Barbarous nations — and none 
were, in that respect, more barbarous than our own ances- 
tors — made this capital blunder : the brutes, if you asked 



DINNER, REAL AND REPUTED. 139 

them what was the use of dinner, what it was meant for, 
stared at yon, and replied — as a horse would reply, if 
you put the same question about his provender — that 
it was to give him strength for finishing his work ! 
Therefore, if you point your telescope back to antiquity 5 
about twelve or one o'clock in the daytime, you will 
descry our most worthy ancestors all eating for their 
very lives, eating as dogs eat — viz., in bodily fear that 
some other dog will come and take their dinner away. 
What swelling of the veins in the temples (see Boswell's 10 
natural history of Dr. Johnson at dinner) ! what in- 
tense and rapid deglutition ! what odious clatter of 
knives and plates ! what silence of the human voice ! what 
gravity! what fury in the libidinous eyes with which 
they contemplate the dishes ! Positively it was an in- 15 
decent spectacle to see Dr. Johnson at dinner. But, 
above all, what maniacal haste and hurry, as if the fiend 
were waiting with red-hot pincers to lay hold of the 
hindmost ! 

reader, do you recognize in this abominable picture 20 
your respected ancestors and ours ? Excuse me for say- 
ing, " What monsters ! " I have a right to call my own 
ancestors monsters ; and, if so, I must have the same 
right over yours. For Southey has shown plainly in the 
" Doctor," that every man having four grandparents in 25 
the second stage of ascent, consequently (since each of 
those four will have had four grandparents) sixteen in 
the third stage, consequently sixty -four in the fourth, 
consequently two hundred and fifty-six in the fifth, and 
so on, it follows that, long before you get to the Con- 



140 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 

quest, every man and woman then living will be wanted 
to make up the sum of my separate ancestors ; conse- 
quently, you must take your ancestors out of the very 
same fund, or (if you are too proud for that) you must 

5 go without ancestors. So that, your ancestors being 
clearly mine, I have a right in law to call the whole 
" kit " of them monsters. Quod erat demonstrandum. 
Really and upon my honor, it makes one, for the moment, 
ashamed of one's descent; one would wish to disin- 

10 herit oneself backward, and (as Sheridan says in the 
"Rivals") to "cut the connection." I mentioned four 
tests for determining what meal is, and what is not, din- 
ner : we may now add a fifth — viz., the spirit of festal 
joy and elegant enjoyment, of anxiety laid aside, and of 

15 honorable social pleasure put on like a marriage gar- 
ment. 

And what caused the difference between our ancestors 
and the Romans ? Simply this — the error of interpos- 
ing dinner in the middle of business, thus courting all 

20 the breezes of angry feeling that may happen to blow 
from the business yet to come, instead of finishing, ab- 
solutely closing, the account with this world's troubles 
before you sit down. That unhappy interpolation ruined 
all. Dinner was an ugly little parenthesis between two 

25 still uglier clauses of a teetotally ugly sentence. 
Whereas, with us, their enlightened posterity, to whom 
they have the honor to be ancestors, dinner is a great 
reaction. There lies my conception of the matter. It 
grew out of the very excess of evil. When business 
was moderate, dinner was allowed to divide and bisect 



DINNER, REAL AND REPUTED. 141 

it. When it swelled into that vast strife and agony, as 
one may call it, that boils along the tortured streets of 
modern London or other capitals, men begin to see the 
necessity of an adequate counter-force to push against 
this overwhelming torrent, and thus maintain the equi- 5 
librium. Were it not for the soft relief of a six o'clock 
dinner, the gentle demeanor succeeding to the boister- 
ous hubbub of the day, the soft glowing lights, the wine, 
the intellectual conversation, life in London is now come 
to such a pass, that in two years all nerves would sink 10 
before it. But for this periodic reaction the modern 
business which draws so cruelly on the brain, and so 
little on the hands, would overthrow that organ in all 
but those of coarse organization. Dinner it is — mean- 
ing by dinner the whole complexity of attendant circum- 15 
stances — which saves the modern brain-working man 
from going mad. 

This revolution as to dinner was the greatest in virtue 
and value ever accomplished. In fact, those are always 
the most operative revolutions which are brought about 20 
through social or domestic changes. A nation must be 
barbarous, neither could it have much business, which 
dined in the morning. They could not be at ease in the 
morning. So much must be granted : every day has its 
separate quantum, its dose of anxiety, that could not be 25 
digested as soon as noon. No man will say it. He, 
therefore, who dined at noon, showed himself will- 
ing to sit down squalid as he was, with his dress un- 
changed, his cares not washed off. And what follows 
from that ? Why, that to him, to such a canine or cyn- 



142 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 

ical specimen of the genus homo, dinner existed only as 
a physical event, a mere animal relief, a purely carnal 
enjoyment. For in what, I demand, did this fleshly 
creature differ from the carrion crow, or the kite, or the 

5 vulture, or the cormorant ? But surely, of the rabid ani- 
mal who is caught dining at noonday, the homo ferns, 
who affronts the meridian sun like Thyestes and Atreus, 
by his inhuman meals, we are, by parity of reason, en- 
titled to say, that he has a " maw " (so has Milton's Death), 

10 but nothing resembling a stomach. And to this vile 
man a philosopher would say — " Go away, sir, and come 
back to me two or three centuries hence, when you have 
learned to be a reasonable creature, and to make that 
physico-intellectual thing out of dinner which it was 

15 meant to be, and is capable of becoming." 

In Henry VII.'s time the court dined at eleven in the 
forenoon. But even that hour was considered so shock- 
ingly late in the French court that Louis XII. actually 
had his gray hairs brought down with sorrow to the 

20 grave, by changing his regular hour of half-past nine to 
eleven, in gallantry to his young English bride. He fell 
a victim to late hours in the forenoon. In Cromwell's 
time they dined at one p.m. One century and a half 
had carried them on by two hours. Doubtless, old cooks 

25 and scullions wondered what the world would come to 
next. Our French neighbors were in the same predica- 
ment. But they far surpassed us in veneration for the 
meal. They actually dated from it. Dinner consti- 
tuted the great era of the day. L 'apres diner is almost 
the sole date which you find in Cardinal De Eetz's mem- 



DINNER, REAL AND REPUTED. 143 

oirs of the Fronde. Dinner was their Ilegire — dinner 
was their line in traversing the ocean of day ; they 
crossed the equator when they dined. Onr English Rev- 
olution came next ; it made some little difference, I have 
heard people say, in church and state ; I dare say it did, 5 
like enough, but its great effects were perceived in din- 
ner. People now dine at two. So dined Addison for 
his last thirty years ; so, through his entire life, dined 
Pope, whose birth was coeval with the Revolution. 
Precisely as the Rebellion of 1745 arose, did people (but 10 
observe, very great people) advance to four p.m. 
Philosophers, who watch the " semina rerum " and the 
first symptoms of change, had perceived this alteration 
singing in the upper air like a coming storm some little 
time before. About the year 1740, Pope complains of 15 
Lady Suffolk's dining so late as four. Young people 
may bear those things, he observed; but as to himself, 
now turned of fifty, if such things went on, if Lady Suf- 
folk would adopt such strange hours, he must really ab- 
sent himself from Marble Hill. Lady Suffolk had a 20 
right to please herself ; he himself loved her. But, if 
she would persist, all that remained for a decayed poet 
was respectfully to cut his stick, and retire. Whether 
Pope ever put up with four o'clock dinners again, I have 
vainly sought to fathom. Some things advance continu- 25 
ously, like a flood or a fire, which always make an end 
of A, eat and digest it, before they go on to B. Other 
things advance per saltum — they do not silently cancer 
their way onwards, but lie as still as a snake after they 
have made some notable conquest, then unobserved they 



144 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

make themselves up " for mischief," and take a flying 
bound onwards. Thus advanced Dinner, and by these 
fits got into the territory of evening. And ever as it 
made a motion onwards, it found the nations more civil- 

5 ized (else the change could not have been effected), and 
co-operated in raising them to a still higher civilization. 
The next relay on that line of road, the next repeating 
frigate, is Cowper in his poem on " Conversation." He 
speaks of four o'clock as still the elegant hour for din- 

10 uer — the hour for the lautiores and the lepidi homines. 
Now this might be written about 1780 or a little earlier; 
perhaps, therefore, just one generation after Pope's 
Lady Suffolk. But then Cowper was living amongst the 
rural gentry, not in high life ; yet, again, Cowper was 

15 nearly connected by blood with the eminent Whig house 
of Cowper, and acknowledged as a kinsman. 

About twenty-five years after this, we may take Ox- 
ford as a good exponent of the national advance. As a 
magnificent body of " foundations," endowed by kings, 

20 nursed by queens, and resorted to by the flower of the 
national youth, Oxford ought to be elegant and even 
splendid in her habits. Yet, on the other hand, as a 
grave seat of learning, and feeling the weight of her po- 
sition in the commonwealth, she is slow to move; she is 

25 inert, as she should be, having the functions of resistance 
assigned to her against the popular instinct (surely active 
enough) of movement. Now, in Oxford, about 1804-5, 
there was a general move in the dinner hour. Those 
colleges who dined at three, of which there were still 
several, now began to dine at four ; those who had dined 



DINNER, REAL AND REPUTED. 145 

at four, now translated their hour to five. These con- 
tinued good general hours till about Waterloo. After 
that era, six, which had been somewhat of a gala hour, 
was promoted to the fixed station of dinner time in ordi- 
nary ; and there, perhaps, it will rest through centuries. 5 
For a more festal dinner, seven, eight, nine, ten, have all 
been in requisition since then ; but I am not aware of 
any man's habitually dining later than ten p.m., except 
in that classical case recorded by Mr. Joseph Miller, of 
an Irishman who must have dined much later than ten, 10 
because his servant protested, when others were enfor- 
cing the dignity of their masters by the lateness of their 
dinner hours, that his master invariably dined " to-mor- 
row." 

Were the Eomans not as barbarous 'as our own ances- 15 
tors at one time ? Most certainly they were ; in their 
primitive ages they took their coena at noon ; that was 
before they had laid aside their barbarism ; before they 
shaved: it was during their barbarism, and in conse- 
quence of their barbarism, that they timed their coena 20 
thus unreasonably. And this is made evident by the 
fact, that, so long as they erred in the hour, they erred 
in the attending circumstances. At this period they had 
no music at dinner, no festal graces, and no reposing on 
sofas. They sat bolt upright in chairs, and were as 25 
grave as our ancestors, as rabid, as libidinous in ogling 
the dishes, and doubtless as furiously in haste. 

With us the revolution has been equally as complex. 
We do not, indeed, adopt the luxurious attitude of semi- 
recumbency j our climate makes that less requisite ; and, 



146 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

moreover, the Romans had no knives and forks, which 
could scarcely be used in that recumbent posture ; they 
ate with their fingers from dishes already cut up — 
whence the peculiar force of Seneca's post quod non 
sunt lavendae mantis. But exactly as our dinner has 
advanced towards evening, have we and has that ad- 
vanced in circumstances of elegance, of taste, of intellect- 
ual value. This by itself would be much. Infinite 
would be the gain for any people, that it had ceased to 

10 be brutal, animal, fleshly ; ceased to regard the chief 
meal of the day as a ministration only to an animal 
necessity ; that they had raised it to a higher office ; 
associated it with social and humanizing feelings, with 
manners, with graces moral and intellectual : moral in 

15 the self-restraint ; intellectual in the fact, notorious to 
all men, that the chief arenas for the easy display of 
intellectual power are at our dinner tables. But dinner 
has now even a greater function than this ; as the fervor 
of our day's business increases, dinner is continually 

20 more needed in its office of a great reaction. I repeat, 
that, at this moment, but for the daily relief of dinner, 
the brain of all men who mix in the strife of capitals 
would be unhinged and thrown off its centre. 

My object has been to point the eye to this fact; to 
25 show uses imperfectly suspected in a recurring accident 
of life ; to show a steady tendency to that consummation, 
by holding up as in a mirror, a series of changes, corre- 
sponding to our own series with regard to the same chief 
meal, silently going on in a great people of antiquity. 



NOTES TO "JOAN OF ARC." 



P. 27, 1. 3. The HebreAV Shepherd Boy. David. See I. Sam- 
uel xviii. 50. 

P. 28, 1. 8. Vancouleurs. A village near Doinre'my. 

P. 28, 1. 22. En contumace. A legal term applied to an accused 
person who fails to appear in court when summoned. 

P. 29, 1. 23. The lilies of France. The royal emblem of France 
from the time of Clovis to the revolution of 1789. 

P. 30, 1. 7. Michelet, Jules (1798-1874). A voluminous and bril- 
liant French writer, who devoted forty years to the preparation of his 
chief work, The History of France, published in nineteen volumes. 
By his "book against the priests," etc. (p. 30, 1. 23), De Quincey prob- 
ably means his Le Pretre, la Femme, et la Famille {Priest, Woman, 
and Family), or his Le Pen pie (The People), which contain the sub- 
stance of his lectures against the Jesuits; probably the former. 

P. 31, 1. 15. Chevy Chase. The original is: — 

" The Perse owt off Northombarlande, 
And a vowe to God mayd he, 
That he wold hunte in the mountayns 
Off Chyviat within days thre, 
In the rnauger of doughte Dogles, 
And all that ever with him be." 

P. 31, 1. 27. Asbestos. An incombustible fibrous mineral, the 
finer varieties of which may be woven into cloth. Charlemagne is 
said to have had a table-cloth made of asbestos, which he was accus- 
tomed to throw into the fire, to the astonishment of his guests. 

P. 32, 1. 6. Pucelle d'Orleans. The Maid of Orleans. 

P. 32, 1. 26. Hannibal. The great Carthaginian general who 

147 



148 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 

ravaged Italy for fifteen years, inflicting on the Romans the loss of 
300,000 men, and from whom Rome narrowly escaped total destruc- 
tion. 

P. 32, 1. 27. Mithradates. Mithradates Eupator, King of Pon- 
tus, " the competitor of Rome for the sovereignty of the East," who 
defeated Roman armies, and massacred 80,000 Italians in one day. 
"The only real honor that he ever received on earth" probably re- 
fers to the royal funeral accorded to him by his conqueror, Pompey. 

P. 33, 1. 3. "Delenda est Angiia Victrix!" Victorious Eng- 
land must be destroyed. Cato the Censor contended that the safety of 
Rome demanded the destruction of Carthage, and concluded every 
speech in the Roman Senate with the words, " Delenda est Carthago," 
" Carthage must be destroyed." 

P. 33, 1. 8. Hyder Ali (1702-1782). " The Mahometan soldier- 
adventurer, who, followed by his son Tippoo, became the most formi- 
dable Asiatic rival the English have ever had in India." Edmund 
Burke, in his famous speech " On the Nabob of Arcot's Debts," pal- 
liated, if he did not excuse, Hyder Ali's ferocious and bloodthirsty 
warfare against British rule in India. Burke's speech is well worth 
reading. 

The career and life of Tippoo were ended at Seringapatam in 1799. 

P. 33, 1. 9. Napoleon. De Quincey detested the character of 
Napoleon. In his essay on Charlemagne he styles the Corsican "the 
sole barbarian of his time : presenting in his deficiencies the picture 
of a low mechanic, and in his positive qualities the violence and 
brutality of a savage." 

P. 33, 1. 17. SuflTrein, Saint Tropez. A French admiral who in 
1780 captured twelve British merchant vessels, and in 1781 defeated 
the British admiral Johnstone. 

P. 34, 1. 7. Champenoise. A native of Champagne. 

P. 34, 1. 10. Cis, this side of. Trans, beyond. 

P. 34, 1. 25. Locus. A place, or point. 

P. 35, 1. 5. That odious man's pigsty. The cause of De Quin- 
cey's "systematic hatred of d'Arc " is given on p. 44. 

P. 35, 1. 19. Three great successive battles. Rudolf of Lorraine 
and his relative, the Count of Bar, fell at Crdcy. Frederick of Lor- 
raine was slain at Agincourt. Bajazet I. defeated the Christian army 
at Nicopolis, in 1396. (For Crecy and Agincourt see note to p. 36, 
1. 25.) 



NOTES TO JOAN OF ARC. 149 

P. 35, 1. 28. Fleurs de Lis. The lilies of France. 

P. 36, 1. 25. Crecy, Poitiers, and Agin court were three great 
battles in the One Hundred Years' War, in each of which the Eng- 
lish defeated the French with great slaughter, especially of the 
French nobility. 

Crecy was fought August 26, 1346, Edward III. completely routing 
a French army three times as numerous as his own. 

At Poitiers (or Poictiers) September 19, 1356, King John of France 
was defeated and captured by Edward the Black Prince, who had also 
greatly distinguished himself at Crecy ten years before. 

Agincourt (or Azincourt) was fought October 25, 1415, when Joan 
of Arc was probably four years old. In this battle Henry V., witb an 
army of half-starved men, defeated a French army of probably sixty 
thousand, commanded by Constable d'Albert. " Eleven thousand 
Frenchmen lay dead on the field, and more than a hundred princes 
and great lords were among the fallen." 

P. 37. 1. 6. The madness of the poor king. Charles VI. 
reigned, nominally, from 1368 to 1422. During his first fit of insanity, 
which was believed to have been induced by the sudden appearance 
of an unknown man, as here related by De Quincey, he killed four of 
his attendants. An accident by which he nearly lost his life caused, 
the next year, a second fit, from which he never entirely recovered. 
The king's condition afforded an opportunity to some of the great 
nobles to carry on hostilities with each other. "War, assassinations, 
famine, and plague destroyed thousands of lives during the reign of 
this wretched monarch. 

P. 37, 1. 24. The termination of the Crusades. The professed 
purpose of the Crusades was to deliver the Holy Land from the 
dominion of the Infidel. For nearly two hundred years (from 1096 
to 1271) the crusading spirit burned with greater or less enthusiasm. 
The Crusades failed to secure the permanent occupation of Palestine 
by the Christians ; but they prolonged the existence of the Eastern 
empire for nearly four centuries, and saved eastern Europe from 
Mahometan conquest. "The ulterior results of the Crusades were 
the breaking up of the feudal system, the abolition of serfdom, the 
supremacy of a common law over the independent jurisdiction of 
chiefs who claimed the right of private wars." — Encyc. Brit. 

P. 37, 1. 25. The destruction of the Templars. The order of 
Knights Templars was the most renowned of the three great military 



150 THOMAS BE QUINCE Y. 

orders founded in the twelfth century for the defense of the Latin 
kingdom of Jerusalem. Their wealth and political power led to their 
suppression, with great cruelties, 1307-1312. 

P. 37, 1. 25. The papal interdicts. An interdict is a decree of a 
pope, of a hishop, or of an ecclesiastical council, forbidding adminis- 
tration of the sacraments, celebration of public worship, and use of 
the burial service. 

P. 37, 1. 26. The house of Anjou. The pathetic struggle of 
Margaret of Anjou to place her son Edward on the English throne, 
to which he was justly entitled, is an illustration of the heroic but 
unsuccessful lives of many members of this bouse. 

P. 37, 1. 26. The Emperor. Sigismund, Emperor of Germany 
from 1433 to 1437. His assent to tbe burning of John Huss, to whom 
he had given a safe conduct, led to the Hussite War of sixteen years. 

P. 37, 1. 29. The colossal figure of feudalism. "Feudalism 
depended on the superiority of the mounted noble to the unmounted 
churl : its fighting power lay in its knighthood. But the English 
yeomen and small freeholders who bore the bow in the national fyrd 
[the male population able to bear arms] had raised their weapons into 
a terrible engine of war: in the English archers, Edward carried a 
new class of soldiers to the fields of France. The churl had struck 
down the noble: the yeoman proved more than a match for the 
knight. From the day of Crecy feudalism tottered slowly but surely 
to its grave."— J. R. Green. 

P. 38, 1. 4. Spectacle of a double pope. "For a period of thirty- 
eight years Christian Europe was scandalized by the contentions of 
two rival popes." — Encyc. Brit. 

P. 38, 1. 6. Which the creature of hell. To the believer in 
either of the rival popes, the other pope was necessarily an impostor. 
In 1402 there were three popes, all of whom were deposed by a gen- 
eral council in 1418. 

P. 39, 1. 8. Roman martyrology. Records of the lives, suffer- 
ings, and deaths of the martyrs of the Roman church. 

P. 39, 1. 9. Miserere. "Have mercy." The first word of the 
Latin version of the fifty-first psalm, usually sung for penitential acts. 

P. 39, 1. 11. Te Deum Laudamus. "We praise thee, O God." 
The first words of an ancient hymn frequently used on joyful and 
triumphant occasions. 

P. 39, 1. 22. The licensed victualler. The tavern-keeper. 



NOTES TO JOAN OF ARC. 151 

P. 40, 1. 16. The Vosges. The disastrous campaign of 1870, which 
overthrew the second empire, again attracted attention to this region. 

P. 40, 1. 25. Carlovingian. Descended from Charlemagne. 

P. 41, 1. 17. Sir Roger de Coverley. A genial character in 
The Spectator. 

P. 42, 1. 15. Bergereta. A Shepherdess. A Latinized form of 
the French berr/erette. * 

P. 42, 1. 25. Hideous scene. Such " hideous scenes "are com- 
mon in several European countries in the year of grace 1892. 

P. 43, 1. 23. Friday. Robinson Crusoe's domesticated savage. 

P. 44, 1. 6. "Chevalier, as-tu donne ail cochon a manger 1 " 
" Chevalier, have you fed the hog? " "Ma fille, as-tu donne au 
cochon a manger 1" "My daughter, have you fed the hog ? " 
'* Pucelle d'Orleans, as-tu sauve les fleurs-de-lys 1 " " Maid 
of Orleans, have you saved the kingdom ? " 

P. 44, 1. 19. The Oriflamme of France. The ancient royal 
standard of France. 

" Press where you see my white plume shine, amid the ranks of war, 
And be your oriflamme, to-day, the helmet of Navarre." 

Macaulay: The Battle of Ivry. 

"The oriflamme was a standard erected to denote that no quarter 
would be given. It is said to have been of red silk, adorned and 
beaten with very broad and fair lilies of gold, and bordered about 
with gold and vermilion. Philip is said by some historians to have 
erected the oriflamme at Cressy, where Edward in return raised up 
his burning dragon, — the English signal for no quarter. The ori- 
flamme was originally used only in wars against the infidels ; for it 
was a sacred banner, and believed to have been sent from heaven." — 
Southey. 

P. 45, 1. 12. Southey's " Joan of Arc." This poem was written 
by Southey when he was nineteen years of age. Southey boasts 
that he wrote all but three hundred lines of it in six weeks : and de- 
scribes it as a poem " crudely conceived, rashly prefaced, and prema- 
turely hurried into the world." 

P. 45, 1. 22. Coup d'essai. First attempt. 

P. 45, 1. 29. She "pricks for sheriffs." An ancient ceremony, 
in which the names of the persons chosen to be sheriffs are pricked 
with a pin. 



152 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

P. 46, 1. 2. Happy Lady of the Islands and the Orient. De 
Quincey thus prophetically anticipates the title assumed by Victoria 
in 1876, — " Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress of 
India." 

P. 46, 1. 18. "On the throne," etc. These lines are from the first 
edition of Southey's " Joan of Arc." The later editions read : — 

" Upon the throne 
Let some one take his seat, and personate 
My presence, while I mingle in the train." 

The " juvenile effort of Southey," as De Quincey describes the 
poem, thus presents this dramatic incident : — 

" Soon is the court convened : the jewelled crown 
Shines on a courtier's head. Amid the train 
The monarch undistinguished takes his place, 
Expectant of the event. The Virgin comes, 
And, as the Bastard led her to the throne, 
Quick glancing o'er the mimic majesty, 
"With gesture and with look like one inspired 
She fixed her eye on Charles : ' Thou art the king! * 
Then, in a tone that thrilled all hearts, pursued : 
1 1 come, the appointed Minister of Heaven, 
To wield a sword before whose fated edge 
Far, far from Orleans shall the English Avolves 
Speed their disastrous flight. Monarch of France ! 
Send thou the tidings over all the realm, — 
Great tidings of deliverance and of joy; 
The maid is come, the missioned maid, whose hand 
Shall in the consecrated walls of Rheims 
Crown thee, anointed king.' " 

Book III., 235-252. 

P. 46, 1. 20. Un peu forte. A little strong. 

P. 47, 1. 9. Oil from the sacred ampulla. Ampulla is a Latin 
word meaning a small jar or flask. In mediaeval church Latin it 
denotes a vessel designed to contain consecrated oil. The word is 
used in the coronation service of English sovereigns. Thus, when 
Victoria was crowned, "The Dean of Westminster, taking the am- 
pulla and spoon from off the altar, holdeth them ready, pouring some 



NOTES TO JOAN OF ARC. 153 

of the holy oil into the spoon, and with it the archbishop anointeth 
the Queen in the form of a cross." The most celebrated ampulla in 
history is that from which the kings of France were anointed at 
Rheirns, which, according to a national legend, was brought from 
heaven by an angel for the coronation of Clovis in 482. 

P. 47, 1. 11. The English boy. Henry VI., son of Henry V., was 
proclaimed king of England and France in 1422, at the age of nine 
months. The dauphin was crowned at Poitiers, as Charles VII., in 
the same year. Henry VI. was crowned at Westminster in 1429, and 
at Paris in 1430. 

By the treaty of Troyes, 1420, the dauphin (afterwards Charles VII.) 
was disinherited, and Henry V. declared heir to the crown of France, 
and regent during the life of Charles VI. This treaty was solemnly 
ratified by Charles VI., and confirmed by the States General of France. 
Henry V. married Catharine, the eldest daughter of Charles VI. 
Henry V. and Charles VI. both died in 1422. 

P. 47, 1. 14. The ovens of Rheims. Rheims is " famous for its bis- 
cuit and gingerbread." In the cathedral of Notre Dame, in Rheims, 
the ancient kings of France were crowned. Rheims was an important 
town in the time of Caesar. 

P. 47, 1. 21. Appalled the doctors. In later editions of Southey's 
poem this is changed to — 

" The doctors stood astonished, and somewhile 
They listened still in wonder." 

P. 47, 1.27. Tindal's "Christianity as Old as the Creation" was 
published in 1730. 

P. 47, 1. 29. A parte ante. From something already past. 

P. 48, 1. 1. Cottle. The Bristol publisher of the first edition of 
Southey's " Joan of Arc." 

P. 48, 1. 16. Paradise Regained, Book I., 196-206. 

P. 50, 1. 15. Coup de main. An unexpected blow. 

P. 52, 1. 14. " Nolebat uti ense suo, aut quemquem interfi- 
cere." " She did not wish to use her sword, or to kill any one." 

P. 53, 1. 18. " She was made prisoner by the Burgundians." 
Hume says, " The common opinion was that the French officers, find- 
ing the merit of every victory ascribed to her, had, in envy of her 
renown, by which they themselves were so much eclipsed, willingly 
exposed her to this fatal accident." 



15J: THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

P. 53, 1. 19. Surrendered to the English. She was sold to the 
English for ten thousand francs. 

P. 53, 1. 23. Bishop of Beauvais. Pierre Cauchon, Rector of the 
University at Paris, and devoted to the interests of the English 
party. 

P. 53, 1. 25. Bishop that art, etc. Prohably suggested by the 
witches' address to Macbeth: " Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and 
shalt be what thou art promised." Macbeth, Act I., 3 and 5. 

P. 53, 1. 28. A triple crown. The pope's tiara consists of a tall 
cap of golden cloth, encircled by three coronets, and surmounted by a 
ball and cross of gold. 

P. 56. 1. 24. Nostalgia. Homesickness. 

P. 57, 1. 25. Woman, sister. These words introduce a celebrated 
passage. 

P. 58, 1. 3. From the four winds. " Come from the four winds, 
O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live." — Ezekiel 
xxxvii. 9. 

P. 58, 1. 16. Tellurian. Inhabitants of tellus, the earth. 

P. 58, 1. 20. Luxor. A magnificent ruin in ancient Thebes. 

P. 59, 1. 6. Marie Antoinette. Daughter of Maria Theresa of 
Austria, and queen of Louis XVI., bebeaded October 16, 1793. 

P. 59, 1. 11. Charlotte Corday, believing that she should thereby 
free her country from the tyranny of the revolutionists, killed Marat, 
July 15, 1793. Two days afterwards she was guillotined, meeting 
death with calmness. 

P. 60, 1. 18. Grafton. Grafton's Chronicle was published in 1569. 

P. 60, 1. 22. Holinshead. Holinshead's Chronicle was published 
in 1587. It thus describes the maid : " Of favor was she counted like- 
some : of person stronglie made, and manlie : of courage, great, hardie, 
and stout withall." 

De Serres, an old writer, says, " She had a modest countenance, 
sweet, civill, and resolute." 

P. 61, 1. 17. Elder Christian martyrs. The first persecution of 
the Christians by Nero was designed by that tyrant to cast upon them 
the odium of the burning of his capital. Rome, tolerant of all other 
religions, was hostile to Christianity. The Roman emperor was re- 
garded as the divine head of the Roman state; and the Christian 
abhorrence of idolatry and polytheism was considered as enmity to the 
empire. Even Aurelian, " the noblest of pagans, the crown and 



NOTES TO JOAN OF ARC. 155 

flower of Stoicism," deemed it his duty to sanction the extermination 
of a sect which he regarded as composed of atheists and enemies to 
his government. 

P. 62, 1. 21. A priori. Reasoning a priori deduces conclusions 
from definitions already formed, or from principles known or assumed. 

P. 62, 1. 23. Ergo. Therefore. 

P. 62, 1. 27. Onus. Weight. Onus proband!, the burden, or 
duty, of proving. 

P. 66, 1. 16. Regent of France. John, Duke of Bedford, brother 
of Henry V. " Ingenious for war as in political capacity, John was 
hardly inferior to Henry himself." — J. R. Green. 

P. 66, 1. 16. Lord of Winchester. Cardinal Winchester, the only 
English member of the court that condemned Joan. 

P. 67, 1. 7. Who is this that cometh from Domremy? " Who 
is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? " 
Isaiah lxiii. 1. Like most great English authors, De Quincey shows 
familiarity with the Bible. 



NOTES TO "THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH." 



P. 69, 1. 6. Vast distances. " One case was familiar to mail-coach 
travellers, where two mails in opposite directions, north and south, 
starting the same minute from points six hundred miles apart, 
met almost constantly at a particular bridge which bisected the total 
distance." — De Quincey. 

See note to page 75, line 16. 

P. 69, 1. 21. Trafalgar. A celebrated naval battle off Cape Tra- 
falgar, on the coast of Spain, October 21, 1805, in which the English 
fleet under Admiral Nelson defeated the combined French and Span- 
ish fleets. 

P. 69, 1. 21. Salamanca. A city in Spain, near which Welling- 
ton defeated the French under Marmont, July 22, 1812. 

P. 69, 1. 22. Vittoria. Another Spanish city, near which, June 
21, 1813, Wellington " inflicted on the French a defeat which drove 
them in utter rout across the Pyrenees." — J. R. Green. 

P. 69, 1. 23. Waterloo. One of the great battles of the world, in 
which Wellington defeated Napoleon in person, June 16, 1815. Many 
monuments and street-names in London bear witness to the deep im- 
pression made on the English people by the struggle with Napoleon. 

P. 70, 1. 21. Non magna loquimur. Wo do not talk of great 
things. 

P. 70, 1.22. Magna vivimus. We experience great things; strictly, 
we live great things. 

P. 71, 1. 14. Nile. The French fleet which had escorted Napoleon 
and his army to Egypt was destroyed by Nelson in Aboukir Bay, 
August 1, 1798. 

P. 72, 1. 22. Audacity. "Such the French accounted it."— De 
Quincey. 

P. 73, 1. 5. At that time. " I speak of the era previous to Water- 
loo." — De Quincey. 

P. 73, 1. 5. St. Martin's-le-Grand. Great St. Martin's. A street 
in London named from the church of the same name. St. Martin's-in- 
the-Fields is opposite Trafalgar Square. 

156 



NOTES TO THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 157 

P. 73, 1. 8. Attelage. Team. 

P. 74, 1. 3. Liaurels in their hats. For many centuries the laurel 
has been the emblem of victory. 

P. 75, 1.6. Badajoz. A Spanish city stormed by "Wellington in 1812. 

P. 75, 1. 16. Three hundred. " Of necessity this scale of meas- 
urement, to an American, if he happens to be a thoughtless man, 
must sound ludicrous. Accordingly, I remember a case in which an 
American writer indulges himself in the luxury of a little fibbing, by 
ascribing to an Englishman a pompous account of the Thames, con- 
structed entirely upon American ideas of grandeur, and concluding in 
something like these terms : ' And, sir, arriving at London, this 
mighty father of rivers attains a breadth of at least two furlongs, hav- 
ing, in its winding course, travelled the astonishing distance of one 
hundred and seventy miles.' .... The glory of the Thames is meas- 
ured by the destiny of the population to which it ministers, by the 
commerce which it supports, by the grandeur of the empire in which, 
though far from the largest, it is the most influential stream. Upon 
some such scale, and not by a transfer of Columbian standards, is the 
course of our English mails to be valued." — De Quince]/. 

P. 75, 1. 22. The City. The old central part of London, about a 
square mile in extent, is called The City ; to this area the jurisdiction 
of the Lord Mayor of London is limited. 

P. 77, 1. 16. Barnet. A market town eleven miles from London, 
on the great northern road. 

P. 79, 1. 3. Fey. Condemned to a sudden or violent death. 

P. 79, 1.28. Talavera. A town in Spain, where Wellington 
defeated the French, July 27, 28, 1809. 

P. 80, 1. 5. Peninsular army. The British army in Spain. 

P. 84, 1. 18. Jus dominii. The law of ownership. 

P. 84, 1. 28. Jus gentium. The law of nations. 

P. 85, 1. 15. Monstrum horrendum. Virgil's ^Eneid, Book III., 
line 658. De Quincey translates it. The reference is to Polyphemus, 
one of the Cyclops, whose eye was destroyed by Ulysses. Odyssey, 
Book IX., 514 et seq. ^Eneid, Book III., 630 et seq. 

P. 85, 1. 19. Calendars. Three disguised princes, each of whom 
had lost his right eye. 

P. 85, 1. 28. Al Sirat. In Mahometan theology, the bridge over 
Hades, its width that of a sword's edge, which souls must cross on 
their wav to Paradise. 



158 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

P. 88, 1. 1. Confluent. " Suppose a capital Y (the Pythagorean 
letter) : Lancaster at the foot of the letter ; Liverpool at the top of the 
right branch ; Manchester at the top of the left ; proud Preston at the 
centre where the two branches unite. It is thirty-three miles along 
either of the two branches; it is twenty-two miles along the stem — 
viz., from Preston in the middle to Lancaster at the root. There's a 
lesson in geography for the reader." — De Quincey. 

P. 88, 1. 7. Apollo. The Roman god of light, prophecy, music, 
poetry, the arts and sciences. Apollo was often confounded with the 
Greek god Helios (the sun), who is represented as driving four fire- 
breathing steeds. 

P. 88, 1. 8. Aurora. The Roman personification of Eos, the Greek 
goddess of the dawn. She yokes her horses, Lampetus and Phaethon, 
to her chariot, and drives to open the gates of heaven for Helios. 

P. 88. 1. 12. Pagan Pantheon. All the gods of the pagan myth- 
ology. 

P. 89, 1. 24. Sigh-born. " I owe the suggestion of this word to 
an obscure remembrance of a beautiful phrase in ' Giraldus Cambren- 
sis,' — viz., suspiriosx cogitationes." — De Quincey. 

P. 92, 1. 20. Wrong side of the road. " It is true that, according 
to the law of the case as established by legal precedents, all carriages 
were required to give way before royal equipages, and therefore 
before the mail as one of them. But this only increased the danger, 
as being a regulation very imperfectly made known, very unequally 
enforced, and therefore often embarrassing the movements on both 
sides." — De Quincey. 

P. 92, 1. 23. Quartering. " This is the technical word, and, I pre- 
sume, derived from the French cartayer, to evade a rut, or any obsta- 
cle." — De Quincey. 

P. 95, 1. 8. Shout of Achilles. After the Trojans had slain 
Patroclus, and were driving the hard-pressed Greeks to their ships, 
Achilles, directed by Juno, showed himself to the enemy. 

" There he stood, 
And shouted loudly ; Pallas joined her voice, 
And fear infused in all the Trojan host." 

Iliad, Book XVIII. 

P. 101, 1. 2. Averted signs. " I read the course and changes of 
the lady's agony in the succession of her involuntary gestures ; but 
it must be remembered that I read all this from the rear, never once 



NOTES TO ENGLISH MAIL-COACH. 159 

catching the lady's full face, and even her profile imperfectly." — Be 
Quincey. The expression has in it a suggestion of death. 

P. 101, 1. 5. Woman's Ionic form. The Ionic column " symbol- 
izes the fine proportions and the elegance of woman." — Vitruvius. 

P. 102, 1. 23. Corymbi. The Latin plural of corymb, a cluster; 
a form of inflorescence. 

P. 108, 1. 2. Campo Santo. "It is probable that most of my 
readers will be acquainted with the history of the Campo Santo (or 
cemetery), at Pisa, composed of earth brought from Jerusalem for a 
bed of sanctity, as the highest prize which the noble piety of crusa- 
ders could ask or imagine. To readers who are unacquainted with 
England, or who (being English) are yet unacquainted with the 
cathedral cities of England, it may be right to mention that the 
graves within-side the cathedrals often form a flat pavement over 
which carriages and horses might run ; and perhaps a boyish remem- 
brance of one particular cathedral, across which I had seen passen- 
gers walk, and burdens carried, as, about two centuries back, they 
were through the middle of St. Paul's, in London, may have assisted 
my dream." — Be Quincey. 

In his revision of his writings in 1853, the author thus writes of 

" The English Mail Coach : " Thirty-seven years ago, or rather 
more, accident made me, in the dead of night, and of a night memo- 
rably solemn, the solitary witness to an appalling scene, which threat- 
ened instant death, in a shape the most terrific, to two young people 
whom I had no means of assisting, except in so far as I was able to 
give them a most hurried warning of their danger; but even that not 
till they stood within the very shadow of the catastrophe, being 
divided from the most frightful of deaths by scarcely more, if more 
at all, than seventy seconds. 

Such was the scene, such in its outline, from which the whole of 
this paper radiates as a natural expression. The scene is circumstan- 
tially narrated in Section the Second, entitled " The Vision of 
Sudden Death." 

But a movement of horror and of spontaneous recoil from this 
dreadful scene naturally carried the whole of that scene, raised and 
idealized, into my dreams, and very soon into a rolling succession of 
dreams. The actual scene, as looked down upon from the box of the 
mail, was transformed into a dream, as tumultuous and changing as 
a musical fugue. This troubled dream is circumstantially reported 



160 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 

in Section the Third, entitled " Dream Fugue upon the Theme of 
Sudden Death." What I had beheld from my seat upon the mail, — 
the scenical strife of action and passion, of anguish and fear, as I had 
there witnessed them moving in ghostly silence ; this duel between 
life and death narrowing itself to a point of such exquisite evanes- 
cence as the collision neared, — all these elements of the scene' 
blended, under the law of association, with the previous and perma- 
nent features of distinction investing the mail itself, which features, 
at that time, lay — first, in velocity unprecedented; secondly, in the 
power and beauty of the horses; thirdly, in the official connection 
wiith the government of a great nation ; and fourthly, in the function, 
almost a consecrated function, of publishing and diffusing through the 
land the great political events, and especially the great battles during 
a conflict of unparalleled grandeur. These honorary distinctions are 
all described circumstantially in the First or introductory section 
("The Glory of Motion"). The three first were distinctions main- 
tained at all times; but the fourth and grandest belonged exclu- 
sively to the war with Napoleon; and this it was which most natu- 
rally introduced Waterloo into the dream. Waterloo, I understood, 
was the particular feature of the "Dream Fugue " which my censors 
were least able to account for. [Some critics had professed their ina- 
bility to apprehend the meaning of the essay.] Yet surely Waterloo, 
which, in common with every other great battle, it had been our 
special privilege to publish all over the land, most naturally entered 
the Dream under the license of our privilege. 

So far as I know, every element in the shifting movements of the 
dream derived itself either primarily from the incidents of the actual 
scene, or from secondary features associated with the mail. For 
example, the cathedral isle derived itself from the mimic combina- 
tion of features which grouped themselves together at the point of 
approaching collision, namely an arrow-like section of the road, six 
hundred yards long, under the solemn lights described, with lofty 
trees meeting overhead in arches. The guard's horn again — a 
humble instrument in itself — was yet glorified as the organ of publi- 
cation for so many great national events. And the incidents of the 
Dying Trumpeter, who rises from a marble bas-relief, and carries a 
marble trumpet to his marble lips for the purpose of warning the 
female infant, was doubtless secretly suggested by my own imperfect 
effort to seize the guard's horn, and to blow a warning blast. 



NOTES TO "LEVANA AND OUR LADIES 
OF SORROW." 



This, says Professor Masson, " is of as high importance as any- 
thing he ever wrote. It is, perhaps, the highest and finest thing, 
and also the most constitutionally significant, in all De Quincey." 

P. 114. 1. 4. Levare. Also, to console. 

P. 114, 1. 24. Glimmering. " As I have never allowed myself to 
covet any man's ox or his ass, nor anything that is his, still less 
would it become a philosopher to covet other people's images or met- 
aphors. Here, therefore, I restore to Mr. Wordsworth this fine 
image of the revolving wheel, and the glimmering spokes, as applied 
by him to the flying successions of day and night. I borrowed it for 
one moment in order to point my own sentence; which, being done, 
the reader is witness that I now pay it back instantly by a note made 
for that sole purpose." — De Quincey. 

P. 115, 1. 7. Eton. A noted English school, preparatory to the 
universities, near Windsor, founded in 1441, by Henry VI. 

P. 115, 1. 7. Foundation. A permanent endowment: a scholar- 
ship. 

P. 115, 1. 20. Graces. The daughters of Bacchus and Venus,— 
Aglaia,' Thalia, and Euphrosyne. 

P. 115, 1. 21. Parcae. The Fates, — Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, 
who presided over human destiny. 

P. 115, 1. 24. Furies. The Avenging Deities, — Tisiphone, Alecto, 
and Megaera, frequently called the Evmenides (well-meaning god- 
desses), since people dreaded to call them by their proper name. 

P. 115, 1. 26. Muses. Originally three in number. Hesiod first 
records the name of the nine: Clio (muse of history), Euterpe (lyric 
poetry), Calliope (epic poetry), Polyhymnia (lofty and miscellaneous 
song), Erato (erotic poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Thalia (comedy), 
Terpsichore (dance and song), Urania (astronomy). 

P. 117, 1. 14. Mater Lachrymarum. Mother of Tears. 

P. 117, 1. 17. Rama. See Matthew ii. 18. 
161 



162 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 

P. 119, 1. 17. Pariah. Originally a member of the lowest class in 
India: hence a social outcast. De Quincey's life when a boy in Lon- 
don evidently developed his sympathy with the poor and despised 
of both sexes. 

P. 119, 1. 17. Jew. For many centuries the Jews were persecuted 
on the slightest pretext. For some horrible facts, see Hecker's 
" The Black Death." 

P. 119, 1. 19. Norfolk Island. An island near Australia to which 
the worst British convicts were banished. 

P. 120, 1. 6. Sepulchral lamps. Lamps placed by the Romans 
at the tombs of relatives. 

P. 120. 1. 24. Cybele. The mother of Zeus (Jupiter), and of the 
order of deities of which he was the head, hence called the " mother 
of gods." She was attended by lions, and wore a mural crown. 

P. 121, 1. 15. Mater Tenebrarum, 31other of Darkness. The 
Latin word tenebrae frequently denotes the infernal regions. 

P. 121, 1. 16. Semnai Theai. The name given to the Furies [or 
Eumenides] at Athens, where they were worshipped. 

" The word ai/jivos is usually rendered venerable in dictionaries; not 
a very flattering epithet for females. But by weighing a number of 
passages in which the word is used pointedly, I am disposed to think 
that it comes nearest to our idea of the sublime, as near as a Greek 
word could come." — De Quincey. 



"This is prose poetry: but it is more. It is a permanent addition 
to the mythology of the human race. As the Graces are three, as the 
Fates are three, as the Furies are three, as the Muses were originally 
three, — so may the varieties and degrees of misery that there are in 
the world, and the proportion of their distribution among mankind, 
be represented to the human imagination forever by De Quincey's 
Three Ladies of Sorrow and his sketch of their figures and king- 
doms." — Masson. 

For a discussion of the elements of poetry, defined as "the expres- 
sion of the imagination," independent of versification, see Shelley's 
" Defence of Poetry." 



NOTES TO "DINNEK, EEAL AND KEPUTED." 



This essay is in De Quincey's lighter vein, though with a serious 
purpose as expressed in the last paragraph. 

P. 123, 1. 6. Ridentem dicere verum quid vetatl Why should 
not one speak the truth with pleasantry ? 

P. 123, 1. 21. The pourquoi of the pourquoi. The why of the 
wherefore. 

P. 124, 1. 7. In procinctu. Girded: ready for battle: a technical 
term. Used by Milton in " Paradise Regained." 

P. 124, 1. 28. Aequatis aequandis. The necessary changes hav- 
ing been made. 

P. 126, 1. 3. Seneca (b.c 3-65 a.d.). Writer, statesman, and 
philosopher: " the most brilliant figure of his time." 

P. 126, 1. 4. Lucifugae. Light-shunners. 

P. 126, 1. 13. lake good boys, from seven to nine o'clock. 
" As I am perfectly serious, I must beg the reader, who fancies any 
joke in all this, to consider what an immense difference it must 
have made to the earth, considered as a steward of her own resources 
— whether great nations, in a period when their resources were so 
feebly developed, did, or did not, for many centuries, require can- 
dles; and, I may add, fire. The five heads of human expenditure 
are: 1. Food; 2. Shelter; 3. Clothing; 4. Fuel; 5. Light. All were 
pitched on a lower scale in the Pagan era; and the two last were 
almost banished from ancient housekeeping. What a great relief 
this must have been to our good mother, the earth! who, at first, 
was obliged to request of her children that they would settle around 
the Mediterranean. She could not even afford them water unless 
they would come and fetch it themselves out of a common tank or 
cistern." — De Quincey. 

P. 126, 1. 19. Numa Pompilius. The second of the legendary 
kings of Rome. 

P. 126, 1. 21. Superb. A play on the name of Tarquinius Super- 
bus, the sixth and last legendary king of Rome. 

163 



164 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 

P. 127, 1. 4. Much mischief is brewed by candle-light. The 

author's literary work was done largely at night. 

P. 127, 1. 7. Barbati. Bearded; hence The Ancients, since the 
old Romans wore beards. 

P. 127, 1. 17. Matin susurrus. Morning murmuring. 

P. 127, 1. 18. Mane salutantes. Those saluting early in the day. 
" There can be no doubt that the levees of modern princes and minis- 
ters have been inherited from the ancient usage of Rome, one of 
which belonged to Rome republican, as well as Rome imperial. The 
fiction in our modern practice is, that we wait upon the lever, or rising 
of the prince. In France, at one era, this fiction was realized; the 
courtiers did really attend the kings dressing. And, as to the queen, 
even up to the Revolution, Marie Antoinette gave audience at her 
toilet." — Be Quincey. 

P. 127, 1. 25. Jus suffragium. The right of suffrage; the ballot. 

P. 128, 1. 15. Galen (a.d. 130?-200?). "The most celebrated of 
ancient medical writers," a native of Pergamus, but for many years 
resident at Rome. 

P. 129, 1. 2. Salle 6. manger. Dining-room. 

P. 129, 1. 4. Jentabat. The form of the verb implies the habit, 
not a single act. 

P. 129, 1. 17. Artos zeros. Dry bread. 

P. 129, 1. 19. Salmasius (a.d. 1588-1653). "The most distin- 
guished classical scholar of his day." De Quincey says of him: " A 
scholar so complete as Salmasius, whom nothing ever escapes." 

P. 129, 1. 25. "Siccum pro biscocto, ut hodie vocamus, sume- 
mus," "We take siccum, dry, to mean biscoctum, twice baked, as 
we say nowadays." 

The two preceding and the following Latin extracts De Quincey 
translates. 

P. 130, 1. 5. Dipuros. Twice baked. 

P. 130, 1. 11. Barmecide feast. See unabridged dictionary. 

P. 130, 1. 15. Magnificum — ignotum. Omne ignotum pro miri- 
Jico, Everything not understood is considered miraculous, probably 
suggested this; i.e., What is not understood is magnificent. 

P. 130, 1. 17. Pliny the Younger (a.d. 61?-115). A Roman law- 
yer and man of letters, of great wealth, humanity, and piety. 

P. 130, 1. 24. Gustabat. De Quincey translates this word, " he 
broke his fast on a morsel of biscuit." 



NOTES TO DINNER, ETC. 165 

P. 130, 1. 26. Prandium. Understood by some to mean dinner, 
by De Quincey to mean kincheon. 

P. 131, 1. 8. Relief — chancery. A play on legal terms. 

P. 132, 1. 3. Prisca, etc. " Let others take delight in old customs: 
I congratulate myself that I was not born till the present time. This 
age suits my habits." 

Ovid (b.c. 43-17 a.d.). The last of the great poets of the Augustan 
Era. 

P. 132, 1. 13. "Non si male," etc. Horace, II., 10, 17. " If we 
do not have ill luck to-day, we shall to-morrow." 

P. 133, 1. 27. Raro prandebant veteres. The ancients seldom 
took prandium. 

P. 134, 1. 8. Onus. Burden. 

P. 134, 1. 26. Impransus. Not having had prandium. 

P. 134, i. 27. Jent&sse. To have had j entaculum. 

P. 134, 1. 29. Boukkismos. A mouthful. 

P. 135, 1. 12. Patronus. Patron. 

P. 135, 1. 17. "Romanos rerum dominos, gentemque toga- 
tam." Aeneid, I., 282. " The toga-clad nation, the Romans, masters 
of the world." 

P. 135, 1. 30. Immeasurable toga. " It is very true that in the 
time of Augustus the toga had disappeared amongst the lowest plebs, 
and greatly Augustus was shocked at that spectacle. It is a very 
curious fact in itself, especially as expounding the main cause of the 
civil wars. Mere poverty and the absence of bribery from Rome, 
whilst all popular competition for offices drooped, can alone explain 
this remarkable revolution of dress.' ' — De Quincey. 

The toga may be seen in Italy at the present time, worn on the 
street by beggars. 

P. 136, 1. 3. Uti se apricaret. That he might bask in the sun. 

P. 136. 1. 7. Hadrian (a.d. 76-138). One of the greatest and best 
of the Roman emperors, though guilty of cruelty in his old age. 

P. 136, 1. 9. "Civitas opulenta," etc. A state wealthy and pros- 
perous, where no one was unemployed. 

P. 136, I. 20. Faex Romuli. The dregs of the Roman populace. 

P. 137, 1. 1. Afflches. Placards. 

P. 137, 1. 18. Palaestra. Gymnasium. 

P. 137, 1. 27. John Quires. Quires means a Roman citizen. An 
expression analogous to Johnny Crapeau, slang for Frenchman. 



166 THOMAS DE QUINCE Y. 

P. 140, 1. 7. Quod erat demonstrandum. "Which was to be 

proved. 

P. 141, 1. 1. Agony. The word here has its original meaning, 
earnest struggling. 
P. 141, 1. 25. Quantum. Allowance. 
P. 142, 1. 6. Homo ferus. Savage. 

P. 142, 1. 7. Thyestes and Atreus. In revenge for a great wrong, 
Atreus killed the two sous of Thyestes, and gave the flesh as food to 
Thyestes, who unwittingly ate of it. 
P. 142, 1. 9. Milton's Death. Paradise Lost, Book II., 848. 
P. 142, 1. 21. His young English bride. Mary Tudor, the lovely 
young sister of Henry VIII. "It is odd that this amiable prince, so 
memorable as having been a martyr to late dining at eleven a.m., 
was the same person who is so equally memorable for the noble, 
almost the sublime answer about a King of France not remembering 
the wrongs of a Duke of Orleans." — Be Quincey. 
P. 142, 1. 29. L'apres diner. After dinner. 

P. 143, 1. 1. The Fronde. A civil war in France, 1648-51, of 
which De Retz was the prime instigator. 

P. 143, 1. 2. Line. Crossing the line is the nautical expression for 
crossing the equator. 

P. 143, 1. 10. Rebellion of 1745. The attempt of Charles Ed- 
ward, grandson of James II., to secure the crown of England. The 
rebellion was crushed at Culloden, April 16, 1746. 
P. 143, 1. 12. Semina rerum. The seeds, or causes of things. 
P. 143, 1. 23. Cut his stick. To die. De Quincey occasionally 
shocks his readers by using slang. See p. 127, 11. 6, 7; p. 128, 1. 28. 
P. 143, 1. 28. Per saltum. By a leap. 

P. 144, 1. 10. Lautiores. The luxurious. Lepidi homines. The 
refined gentlemen. 

P. 145, 1. 17. Their coena at noon. "The Roman gourmands 
and bons vivants continued through the very last ages of Rome to take 
their coena, when more than usually sumptuous, at noon. This 
indeed, all people did occasionally, just as we sometimes give a 
dinner, even now, as early as four p.m., under the name of a break- 
fast." — Be Quincey. 

P. 146, 1. 4. Post quod non sunt lavendae manus." " After 
which one's hands need not be washed." See p. 134, 11. 18-21. 



W$z Students' Scries of ISngltefj Classics, 



TO furnish the educational public with well-edited editions of 
those authors used in, or required for admission to, many of 
the colleges, the publishers announce this new series. The fol- 
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Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, 30 ots. 

A Ballad Book, .... 54 . . 

Edited by Katharine Lee Bates, Wellesley College. 
Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Bustum, 30 

Webster's First Bunker Hill Oration, 30 

Edited by Louise Manning Hodgkins, Wellesley College. 
Introduction to the Writings of John Buskin, . 54 

Macaulay's Essay on Lord Glive, ... 42 

Edited by Vlda D. Scudder, Wellesley College. 
George Eliot's Silas Marner, 42 

Scott's Marmion, . . 42 

Edited by Mary Harriott Morris, Instructor, New York. 
Sir Boger de Coverley Papers from The Spectator, . 42 

Edited by A. S. Roe, Worcester, Mass. 
Macaulay's Second Essay on the Earl of Chatham, . 42 

Edited by W. W. Curtis, High School, Pawtucket, R.I. 

Johnson's History of Rasselas, 42 

Edited by Fred N. Scott, University of Michigan. 
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